Doris Lessing Quotes

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochiali...

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

...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.

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

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imaginat...

Laughter is by definition healthy.

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

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

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very ...

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is...

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's n...

Think wrongly if you please but in all cases think for yourself.

Oh, I simply can’t think. When I really want to depress myself, I think of all the brilliant men I k...

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't t...

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of co...

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

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too ofte...

What is a hero without love for mankind.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay wit...

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given...

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

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic...

Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what e...

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to s...

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a ...

But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people....

That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life but in a ne...

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dicta...

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

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it ...

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected...

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history canno...

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Am...

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

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty y...

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

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

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women p...

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our sto...

What matters most is that we learn from living.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy,...

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must ...

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years...

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticip...

THE LILIESThis morning it was, on the pavement, When that smell hit me again And set the houses reel...

Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky...

What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the bea...

Her ears, lightly fringed with white that looked silver, lifted and moved, back, forward, listening ...

In the end, the cats were rounded up and put into a room. My father went into the room with his Firs...

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

In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw....

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook?Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion - "nostalgia" is their word for it - wh...

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an inte...

Every evening I sat on the music-stool and wrote down my day, and it was as if I, Anna, were nailing...

Long ago I decided that at a political meeting the truth usually comes out in just such a speech or ...

No, there's a group of hardened, fossilised men opposed by fresh young revolutionaries as John Butte...

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flun...

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into t...

I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from...

What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfoldi...

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of m...

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly less stupid than we are to accept truths tha...

It's a hard case,' said Paul. 'First, I'm twenty. That means I'm very nervous and ill-at-ease with w...

You and I, Ella, we are the failures. We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more s...

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smoo...

People are too emotional about communism, or rather, about their own Communist Parties, to think abo...

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all bec...

I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word load...

I don't think I really saw people except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, tha...

Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Listen Anna, if we don’t believe the things we put on our agendas will come true for us, then there’...

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another qui...

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when yo...

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journ...

The real reason why so many artists now take to politics, ‘commitment’ and so on is that they are ru...

Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of ...

Literature is analysis after the event.

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is someth...

I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H...

I've thought about that often since. I mean, about the word nice. Perhaps I mean good. Of course the...

As I was saying, that’s the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a ...

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political ...

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alter...

What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am f...

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish th...

Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticizes her throughout their lo...

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into t...

It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruel...

I was realizing something I should have known by using my intelligence, without ever having gone to ...

There was a certain struggling fury that went with being jobless, and persevering, and being turned ...

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that lonelines...

What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been bro...

Younger woman says, “I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.”“Yes,” [older w...

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad."“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so...

I’m not going to be like my mother. You’re maniacs. You’re mad.“Yes,” said Kate. “I know it. And so ...

she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she ws in now could be got through quickly, for it w...