Doris Lessing Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes & Sayings

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If one is sensible, if one is reasonable, if one never allows oneself a base thought or an envious emotion, naturally one says: Let's make a foursome! — Doris Lessing

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints. — Doris Lessing

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month? — Doris Lessing

What is a hero without love for mankind. — Doris Lessing

All my friends' mothers were appalling women. — Doris Lessing

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure. — Doris Lessing

You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings. — Doris Lessing

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

If you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand. — Doris Lessing

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

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

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

When there's a war, people get married. — Doris Lessing

If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point. — Doris Lessing

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

Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

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

I haven't got the energy to write now. — Doris Lessing

She could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it. — Doris Lessing

For there is never any way to go but in. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

It is not too much to say that when the word "blood" is pronounced, this is a sign that reason is about to depart. — Doris Lessing

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid. — Doris Lessing

Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers. — Doris Lessing

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so. — Doris Lessing

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

Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability? — Doris Lessing

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings. — Doris Lessing

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation. — Doris Lessing

If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again. — Doris Lessing

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

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

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

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

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

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary! — Doris Lessing

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

Education means only this- that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education. — Doris Lessing

We have no children Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child. — Doris Lessing

Men are unwise and curiously planned. — Doris Lessing

You can only value something if you've experienced it. — Doris Lessing

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

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling. — Doris Lessing

As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul. — Doris Lessing

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

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid. — Doris Lessing

Choose? When do I ever choose? Have I ever chosen? — Doris Lessing

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

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

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

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

The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two ... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism. — Doris Lessing

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides. — Doris Lessing

Category:
Inner-space fiction
For there is never anywhere to go but in. — Doris Lessing

I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. — Doris Lessing

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals. — Doris Lessing

Paul was even more difficult than Ben. But he was a normal "disturbed" child, not an alien. — Doris Lessing

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

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate — Doris Lessing

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

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

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it. — Doris Lessing

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

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

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar. — Doris Lessing

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

Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers. — Doris Lessing

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

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. — Doris Lessing

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

Women are slaves to their beauty. — Doris Lessing

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience. — 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

We need a shape for the tale. A beginning, a middle and an end. — Doris Lessing

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact. — Doris Lessing

There are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other. — Doris Lessing

But far within him something cried For the great tragedy to start, The pang in lingering mercy fall And sorrow break upon his heart. - EDWIN MUIR — Doris Lessing

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable. — Doris Lessing

Every child has the capacity to be everything. — Doris Lessing

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

She wanted to be acknowledged, her predicament given its value. — Doris Lessing

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

He had decided not to be angry: it was killing him. — Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty. — Doris Lessing

I have you for being normal, I hate you for it. You're a normal human being. What right have you to that? — Doris Lessing

None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it. — Doris Lessing

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

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

Laughter is by definition healthy. — Doris Lessing

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

Better Counsel comes overnight. — Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event. — Doris Lessing

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. — Doris Lessing

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

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. — Doris Lessing

[I wrote] '...letters designed to hide behind. — Doris Lessing

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