Doris Lessing Quotes
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I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
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Parents should leave books lying around marked 'forbidden' if they want their children to read.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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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.
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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.
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My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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Pearls mean tears.
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There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
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I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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.
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You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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Small things amuse small minds.
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When there's a war, people get married.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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.'