Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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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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God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
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You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
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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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When there's a war, people get married.
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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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My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
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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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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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Literature is analysis after the event.
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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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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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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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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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I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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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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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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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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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.