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Doris Lessing

56 quotes

“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Grass Is Singing, ch. 2 (1950)
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Martha Quest (1952), Part III, ch. 2
“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Particularly Cats, ch. 2 (1967)
“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Four-Gated City (1969)
“Laughter is by definition healthy.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
“Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
“You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: quoted in "A Talk With Doris Lessing; Lessing Author's Query" (30 March 1980), Minda Bikman, The New York Times Book Review
“It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983), p. 94, Flamingo edition
“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.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles", The New York Times, (22 April 1984)
“You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. 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 (1919–2013) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Herbert Mitgang, "Mrs. Lessing Addresses Some of Life's Puzzles," The New York Times (22 April 1984)
“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 (1919–2013) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Good Terrorist (1985)
“There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by Jon Winokur
“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Guardian, London (7 November 1988)
“All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby Adams, p. 18
“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.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sunday Times (London, 10 May 1992)
“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.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Sunday Times (London, 10 May 1992)
“Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind By Communism", in Our Country, Our Culture - The Politics of Political Correctness (1994), Partisan Review Press, edited by Edith Kurzweil and William Philips
“What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Boston Book Review interview by Harvey Blume (February 1998)
“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 (1919–2013) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Index on Censorship (March/April 1999)
“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 I have said, this was not noticed.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1971 edition)
“I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1971)
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. 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 vice versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction (1971)
“The two women were alone in the London flat. "The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know — Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel — the quality of philosophy.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seems to me like this. It's not a terrible thing — I mean, it may be terrible, but it's not damaging, it's not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. It's not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, I'm capable of doing something bigger. Or I'm a person who needs love, and I'm doing without it. What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the 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 (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. … I knew I was moving into a new dimension, further from sanity than I had ever been.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“None of you ask for anything — except everything, but just for so long as you need it.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Literature is analysis after the event.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, ed. Michael Horovitz (1969): Afterwords, section 2
“The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends — they crossed the street to avoid us.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all — in one way or another — obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[On her first marriage ] I don't think marriages are like that now. It's when you walk into a role. The life was all laid down, what you ate, everything you did, and I went through it all as if it were a role in a play, really, and I hated it bitterly.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have to face the fact that I and my high-minded comrades, both those in that chimerical Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia, and many I have met since ... were of the stuff of those murderers with a clear conscience. We were lucky, that's all.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Doris Lessing: An unusual feminist", The Independent (18 August 2001)
“What matters most is that we learn from living.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Permission to Play : Taking Time to Renew Your Smile (2003) by Jill Murphy Long, p. 147
“Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly", The Times (London, 23 November 2003, reprinted 3 June 2004)
“Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 660
“I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)
“This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: After being chosen as the 2007 recipient of the Nobel Prize For Literature "BBC News", BBC, London (11 October 2007)
“Oh Christ. I couldn't care less. … I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Doris Lessing oldest to win literature Nobel" by Philip Marchand in The Toronto Star (12 October 2007);
“The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) said by 2013 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" […] that’s what my role was […] I can’t understand why I was so gullible.”
Doris Lessing (1919–2013) first seen 1952 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Concerning her 1952 trip to the USSR.