Doris Lessing Quotes
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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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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My father was in the First World War.
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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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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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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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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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It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
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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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For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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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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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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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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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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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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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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Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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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.