Doris Lessing quotes - page 5

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:

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

Doris Lessing

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

Doris Lessing

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

Doris Lessing

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Doris Lessing

The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.

Doris Lessing

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

Doris Lessing

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

Doris Lessing

I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

Doris Lessing

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.

Doris Lessing

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Doris Lessing

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them.

Doris Lessing

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

Doris Lessing

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Doris Lessing

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.

Doris Lessing

You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?

Doris Lessing

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

Doris Lessing

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Doris Lessing

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

Doris Lessing

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Doris Lessing

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

Doris Lessing

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate.

Doris Lessing