Doris Lessing Quotes

What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

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.

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

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

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.

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

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

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

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

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

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

In Shanghai, I saw great contrasts. On one street there would be impressive shops selling copies of the latest word in glamorous European fashion, and around the corner on a back street there were poor families crammed into one room with a naked light bulb. One evening I heard a Chinese family singing "Happy Birthday." It was weird. You would have thought that they'd have their own happy birthday song. Every dominant society in the world - whether it's French or British or American - imposes its culture on less developed societies.

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

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

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

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.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.

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

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.

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.

Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

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.

I wonder why do wars suddenly start and suddenly stop, and why do we Brits and you Americans get involved in some of them and not in others? Is it possible that the arms manufacturers quietly foment wars without us knowing? Dropping bombs is a very profitable business for them. Gore Vidal was talking about this the other day, and he made a lot of sense. Whenever American policy seems inscrutable, he said, remember the military-industrial complex. He's the one who should have been President.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

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

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.

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

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

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

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

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.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

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

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