Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

The act of migration puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes.

If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.

Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that and then I put it out there and say to you, "What do you think?" I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

Doris Lessing really doesn't care what the critics say. In fact, she orders her publishers not to send her the reviews and gets cross with them if they do because she doesn't want that in her head. She's going where she's going, and that's where she wants to go.

Very often, people who actually pick up a book of mine for the first time are kind of surprised. And I get these letters saying, well, who knew that you were good, you know?