Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
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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.
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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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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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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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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.
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Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
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The thing is, I haven't changed at all.
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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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All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
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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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I am your original autodidact.
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I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.