Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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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.'
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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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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
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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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I was taken around and shown things as a 'useful idiot' … that’s what my role was … I can’t understand why I was so gullible.
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I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
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The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.
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I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
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I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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The thing is, I haven't changed at all.