Top 80 Doris Lessing Quotes

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

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

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

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

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

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.

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

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

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

When there’s a war, people get married.

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

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says.

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

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.

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

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

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

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

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.

I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it’s very painful.

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation – but they don’t.

I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, ‘Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,’ but we had children by the dozen and got married.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

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

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

Literature is analysis after the event.

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

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.’

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.

It’s lovely to have money to give away – that’s the bonus of winning the Nobel.

You know, looking at it objectively, I’ve written one or two good books.

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

I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

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

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

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.

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

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

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

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

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.

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

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

I’m not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

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.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Small things amuse small minds.

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

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.

I do have a sense, and I’ve never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

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.

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

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.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

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’m very unhappy when I’m not writing.

My father was in the First World War.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

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

I am your original autodidact.

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

I’m compulsive.

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.

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.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.