Doris Lessing
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Travel
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Age
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.Collection: Trust
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Truth
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.Collection: Learning
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Wisdom
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
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 have ideas that I will probably never write now.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
The human race has been telling stories since it began.
A story is how we construct our experiences.
I'm compulsive.
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
I never stopped reading.
I'm just a story teller.
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
I haven't got the energy to write now.
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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.
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
The thing is, I haven't changed at all.
I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.
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.
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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.
If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
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.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
When there's a war, people get married.
You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.