Doris Lessing Quotes
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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.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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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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My father was in the First World War.
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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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Small things amuse small minds.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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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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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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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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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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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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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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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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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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My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
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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.