When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now --… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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 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
I have kept diaries, of course, but they can't be read for quite a long time. I'm always curious about people who… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never… — 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
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
If she had been left alone she would have gone on, in her own way, enjoying herself thoroughly, until people found one… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our… — 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
The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of… — 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
