Doris Lessing quotes - page 3

Pearls mean tears. (Doris Lessing)
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
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, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
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 on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they dont seem to see this.
Doris Lessing
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 particularly useful. . . . You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
Doris Lessing
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 a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
Doris Lessing
A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Doris Lessing
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
Doris Lessing
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 had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. (Doris Lessing)
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
Doris Lessing
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
Doris Lessing
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Doris Lessing
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
Doris Lessing
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.
Doris Lessing
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. (Doris Lessing)
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.
Doris Lessing
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
Doris Lessing
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 after their writers.
Doris Lessing
It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
Doris Lessing