It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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
I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying.… — 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
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of… — 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
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an… — 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
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
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