for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the… — 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
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do?… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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 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
