Life Quotes by Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

“Harriet’s parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one.”

— Doris Lessing

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

— Doris Lessing

What matters most is that we learn from living.

— Doris Lessing

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

— Doris Lessing

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more…

— Doris Lessing

“Looking back over nearly a quarter of a century, she saw that that had been the characteristic of her life -passivity, adaptability…

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is…

— Doris Lessing

“That’s what life is, getting used to things that are really intolerable…” Her eyes reddened and filled, and again she determinedly blinked…

— Doris Lessing

“This is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”

— Doris Lessing

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

— Doris Lessing

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is…

— Doris Lessing

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…

— Doris Lessing

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't…

— Doris Lessing

“she was wishing that whatever stage of her life she was in now could be got through quickly, for it was seeing…

— Doris Lessing

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than…

— Doris Lessing

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people,…

— Doris Lessing

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in…

— Doris Lessing

“He leaves and she thinks for the hundredth time that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so…

— Doris Lessing

“She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to…

— Doris Lessing

“Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral…

— Doris Lessing

“So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off…

— Doris Lessing

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read…

— Doris Lessing

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off…

— Doris Lessing

“A Nasrudin 'joke' may at first seem unfunny, or pointless, but will after study change and begin to reveal itself: you have…

— Doris Lessing

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is…

— Doris Lessing

“A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The…

— Doris Lessing

“The human being is given by Nature little more energy than what is needed to maintain the species; to reproduce and to…

— Doris Lessing

“Ella finds this story inside herself: A woman, loved by a man who criticises her throughout their long relationship for being unfaithful…

— Doris Lessing

“What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more…

— Doris Lessing

“Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of…

— Doris Lessing

But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful,…

— Doris Lessing

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler,…

— Doris Lessing

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich…

— Doris Lessing

All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up…

— Doris Lessing