Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.'…
• When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief…
• She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young…
• A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
• Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled…
• There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
• The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the…
• What matters most is that we learn from living.
• Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
• And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the…
• Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views…
• Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it…
• Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
• The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
• I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
• Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
• You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way…
• I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly…
• I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record,
• You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

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