Top 367 Quotes & Sayings by Doris Lessing - Page 2

I haven't got the energy to write now.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

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

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

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

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.

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

I never stopped reading.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

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

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

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

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

I'm compulsive.

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

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

I am your original autodidact.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

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.

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 don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

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.'

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

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

You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.

When there's a war, people get married.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

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

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

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

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

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.