Doris Lessing Quotes

My father was in the First World War.

What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

Cats mean kittens, plentiful and frequent.

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies.

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.

Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.

[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .

Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’s no hope for us. We’re going to be saved by what we seriously put on our agendas.

As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream.

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad."“Yes, ” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.“Yes, ” said Kate. “I know it. And so you won’t be. The best of luck to you. And what are you going to be instead?

Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I know, married to their stupid wives. Enough to break your heart, it really is

This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of suble air.

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned down, that was different from simply being jobless.

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a new way.

Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!