Doris Lessing Quotes
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My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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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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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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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 didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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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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There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
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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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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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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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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
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I haven't got the energy to write now.
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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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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 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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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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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.