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… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
... if you have nothing, you are free to choose among dreams and fantasies. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“She was using the water as she had used the fruit earlier—to calm herself, to assure herself of the possibility of normality. Yet all… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.” — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
