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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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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When there's a war, people get married.
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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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None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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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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God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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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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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Literature is analysis after the event.
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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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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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I haven't got the energy to write now.
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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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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
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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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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.