Doris Lessing Quotations

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

My father was in the First World War.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.

I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

I haven't got the energy to write now.

I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.