Doris Lessing

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

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

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 before I popped off.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

I'm compulsive.

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.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

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.

I haven't got the energy to write now.

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.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

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.

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.

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

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

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Small things amuse small minds.

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

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.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

You know, 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.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

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

When there's a war, people get married.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

Literature is analysis after the event.

We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

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.

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.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

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

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

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.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

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.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

Pearls mean tears.

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

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

I am your original autodidact.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

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

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.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

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

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

I never stopped reading.

My father was in the First World War.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.

Bed is the best place for reading thinking or doing nothing.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, amongst other creatures, in a large landscape.

I'm just a story teller.