Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
The Times, London, November 2003. |
There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself
that the second-best is anything but the second-best.
Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook. |
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
The Golden Notebook. |
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in
the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
The Grass Is Singing. |
When old settlers say 'one has to understand the country,'
what thety mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about
the native.'
Doris Lessing
The Grass is Singing. |
What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension,
the unendurable month.
Doris Lessing
Martha Quest. |
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of
the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
Martha Quest. |
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape,
then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
Particularly Cats. |
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending
of something given by nature in her role as spendthrift ...something
extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown
away.
Doris Lessing
Particularly Cats. |
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged
as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
Accepting David Cohen prize for lifetime
of excellence in writing, March 2001. |
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
The Good Terrorist. |
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden"
if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
The Times, London, November 2003. |
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
The Sunday Times, London, 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
The Sunday Times, London, May 1992. |
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something
you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
The Four-Gated City. |
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
The Golden Notebook. |
Laughter is by definition healthy.
Doris Lessing
The Summer Before the Dark. |
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
The Guardian, London, November 1988. |
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
Quoted in Permission to Play: Taking Time
to Review Your Smile (2003) by Jilly Murphy Long. |
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents
and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
Quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia
of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang. |
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
The Summer Before the Dark. |
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
New York Times Book Review, March 1980.. |
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
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire. |
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
The New York Times, 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
The New York Times, April 1984. |
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor
can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Quoted in Writers on Writing (1986) by
Jon Winokur. |
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
Quoted in An Uncommon Scold (1989) by Abby
Adams. |
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
Boston Book Review interview 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
Index on Censorship March/April 1999. |
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.
Doris Lessing
Quoted in NPR (National Public Radio) interview,
October 2007, when she won Nobel Literature Prize. |
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
BBC, London, October 2007, on winning Nobel
Literature Prize. |
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
The Toronto Star, October 2007, on her
Nobel Literature Prize win. |
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
Quoted in undated profile at BBC World
Service. |
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