Doris Lessing quotes:

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.

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

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

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

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

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

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

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

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.

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.

The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

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

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

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

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

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

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

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

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.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.

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

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

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

When there's a war, people get married.

Small things amuse small minds.

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

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

... it is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it ...

You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.

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

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.

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.

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

Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...

Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record,

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

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

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one day that she had turned imperceptibly into one of those women who have become old without ever having been middle aged: a little withered, a little acid, hard as nails, sentimentally kindhearted, and addicted to religion or small dogs.

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.

[The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of "She is unfeminine", "She is a man-hater".

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Little Tamar, forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.

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.

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.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

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

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.

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.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

What of course I would like to be writing is the story of the Red and White Dwarves and their Remembering Mirror, their space rocket (powered by anti-gravity), their attendant entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, and Muon, and the Charmed Quarks and the Coloured Quarks. But we can't all be physicists.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

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

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

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

Pearls mean tears.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Women are slaves to their beauty.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.