Doris Lessing Quotes

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

Small things amuse small minds.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

I'm compulsive.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

I do not think writers ought ever to 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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

- Doris Lessing

When there's a war, people get married.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

- Doris Lessing

I'm just a story teller.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- 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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

My father was in the First World War.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.'

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

Pearls mean tears.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

A story is how we construct our experiences.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

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.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

- Doris Lessing

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

- Doris Lessing

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

- Doris Lessing

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

- Doris Lessing

I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

- Doris Lessing

I am your original autodidact.

- Doris Lessing

I never stopped reading.

- Doris Lessing

What is a hero without love for mankind.

- Doris Lessing

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

- Doris Lessing