Doris Lessing Quotes
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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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.
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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
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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.
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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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I haven't got the energy to write now.
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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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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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.
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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.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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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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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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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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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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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.
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends - they crossed the street to avoid us.
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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.