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.

Too many people spouting too many words, and in the end those words will turn to bullets and stones.

I don't know what to say about literary critics. I think it's probably best to say nothing.

One of the problems with defending free speech is you often have to defend people that you find to be outrageous and unpleasant and disgusting.

If there were Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, it makes it certain there would be a reprisal attack against the United States at some point.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

I beat my sons in real-life table tennis, but virtually, I get murdered. I download games on the iPhone that I'm addicted to - I'm a master at "Angry Birds."