Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
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Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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I'm compulsive.
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Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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I am your original autodidact.
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It's very interesting what you don't care about.
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It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
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I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed
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There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then - we went on dancing.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.