Doris Lessing quotes

Doris Lessing was a British-Zimbabwean novelist, poet, and short story writer renowned for her insightful explorations of society and psychology. Her works, including "The Golden Notebook," challenged conventional norms and examined the complexities of human relationships and politics. She became one of the most influential literary voices of the twentieth century and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Here are 157 of her quotes:

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Doris Lessing

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Doris Lessing

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Doris Lessing

Laughter is by definition healthy.

Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing

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 of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

Doris Lessing

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

Doris Lessing

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Doris Lessing

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Doris Lessing

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

Doris Lessing

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Doris Lessing

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Doris Lessing

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

Doris Lessing

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Doris Lessing

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Doris Lessing

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 you know quite well you're capable of better.

Doris Lessing

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 was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.

Doris Lessing

All sanity depends on this that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

Doris Lessing

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

Doris Lessing

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Doris Lessing