Doris Lessing Quotes
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.
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.
if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
I do not think writers or anybody would 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.
The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.