Doris Lessing Quotes
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I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
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I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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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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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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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.
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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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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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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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None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
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For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
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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.
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I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
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Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
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September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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When there's a war, people get married.
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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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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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What they critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.