Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their…
• What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when…
• A story is how we construct our experiences.
• A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
• All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
• All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
• As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
• I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
• I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
• I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
• I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
• I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
• I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
• I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
• I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
• I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
• If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
• In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
• It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
• It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

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