Doris Lessing Quotes

203 quotes in 2298 categories

• When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
• Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
• I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and,…
• I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write…
• There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to…
• This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer…
• When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look…
• You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all…
• What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen.…
• What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to…
• What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That…
• A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of…
• A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers…
• For with my intuition I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy,…
• There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping…
• ...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
• Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which…
• I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of…
• Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we…
• Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

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