Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in…
• In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams…
• Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read.
• I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
• I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the…
• The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
• If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
• It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is…
• Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.
• Better Counsel comes overnight.
• None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
• Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
• Every child has the capacity to be everything.
• You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
• You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
• It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
• Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why…
• There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in…
• One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
• I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

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