Quotes by Doris Lessing

And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom.
– Doris Lessing
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
– Doris Lessing
Better Counsel comes overnight.
– Doris Lessing
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
– Doris Lessing
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.
– Doris Lessing
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
– Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
– Doris Lessing
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
– Doris Lessing
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
– Doris Lessing
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
– Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
– Doris Lessing
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
– Doris Lessing
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
– Doris Lessing
What is a hero without love for mankind.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
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 are moving easily under the flesh.
– Doris Lessing
Laughter is by definition healthy.
– Doris Lessing
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all.
– Doris Lessing
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
– Doris Lessing
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
– Doris Lessing
When there's a war, people get married.
– Doris Lessing
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
– Doris Lessing
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
– Doris Lessing
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
– Doris Lessing
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
– Doris Lessing
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
– Doris Lessing
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
– Doris Lessing
My father was in the First World War.
– Doris Lessing
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
– Doris Lessing
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
– Doris Lessing
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
– Doris Lessing
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
– Doris Lessing
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
– Doris Lessing
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.
– Doris Lessing
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
– Doris Lessing
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
– Doris Lessing
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
– Doris Lessing
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
– Doris Lessing
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
– Doris Lessing