Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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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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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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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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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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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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I haven't got the energy to write now.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
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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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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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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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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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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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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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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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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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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.'