Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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.
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 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 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.
Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
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.
Literature is analysis after the event.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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.
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.Collection: Design
Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.Collection: Cutting
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.Collection: Thinking
As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.Collection: Wiser You
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.Collection: Real
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.Collection: Dream
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.Collection: Thank You
we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.Collection: Education
This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.Collection: Strong
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.Collection: Tyrants
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.Collection: Song
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.Collection: Mean
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.Collection: Rivers
For there is never any way to go but in.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Party
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.Collection: People
It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests ... Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did.Collection: Stupid
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.Collection: Men
The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.Collection: Stupid
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.Collection: Book
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.Collection: Hate
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.Collection: People
The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.Collection: Kissing
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.Collection: Inspiration
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.Collection: Years
I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.Collection: New York
Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.Collection: Successful
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.Collection: Way
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.Collection: Dream
The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.Collection: Distance
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Country
for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.Collection: Real
On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.Collection: Horse