Doris Lessing Quotes
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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 didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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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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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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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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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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Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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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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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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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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God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
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What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
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I haven't got the energy to write now.
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You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
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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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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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I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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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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The two women were alone in the London flat. 'The point is,' said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, 'the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.'