Doris Lessing Quotes

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

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

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

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.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

For there is never any way to go but in.

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

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.

Literature is analysis after the event.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.

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

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

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

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

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

Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Intelligence forbids tears.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

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

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.

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.

We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference.

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

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

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