Doris Lessing quotes - page 2

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how. (Doris Lessing)
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible. View quote
Doris Lessing
What matters most is that we learn from living. View quote
Doris Lessing
A story is how we construct our experiences. View quote
Doris Lessing
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read. View quote
Doris Lessing
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. View quote
Doris Lessing
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable. View quote
Doris Lessing
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away. View quote
Doris Lessing
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 their own propaganda. View quote
Doris Lessing
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white. View quote
Doris Lessing
Better Counsel comes overnight. (Doris Lessing)
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed. View quote
Doris Lessing
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant. View quote
Doris Lessing
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. View quote
Doris Lessing
Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing. View quote
Doris Lessing
I never stopped reading. View quote
Doris Lessing
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy. View quote
Doris Lessing
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. View quote
Doris Lessing
Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all - in one way or another - obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it. View quote
Doris Lessing
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it. View quote
Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. (Doris Lessing)
The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. ... I was really astounded that some people were shocked. View quote
Doris Lessing
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time. View quote
Doris Lessing
Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, as with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to look carefully at our assumptions, there are twenty rabble-rousers whose real motive is a desire for power over others. The fact that they see themselves as antiracists or feminists or whatever does not make them any less rabble-rousers. View quote
Doris Lessing
None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it. View quote
Doris Lessing