Doris Lessing
I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.Collection: Solitude
What matters most is that we learn from living.Collection: Life
Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.Collection: Spiritual
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.Collection: Thinking
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.Collection: People
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.Collection: Envy
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.Collection: Children
Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.Collection: Children
What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.Collection: Lonely
Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.Collection: Clever
Women are slaves to their beauty.Collection: Women
The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.Collection: Two
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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
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. This is what our function is.Collection: Jobs
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.Collection: Party
Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.Collection: Design
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.Collection: Reading
It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Firsts
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: Strong
When old settlers say ‘One has to understand the country,’ what they mean is, ‘You have to get used to our ideas about the native.’ They are saying in effect, ‘Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don’t want you.’Collection: Country
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag.Collection: Reading
I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.Collection: Reading