3 December 2020 Doris Lessing What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing I think kids ought to travel. I think it’s very good to carry kids around. It’s good for them. Of course it’s tough on the parents.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can’t say I do like it very much.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing It’s lovely to have money to give away – that’s the bonus of winning the Nobel.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing 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 listen to all this, it must be painful.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing 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 whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says.
3 December 2020 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.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It’s a cruel and evil government.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don’t.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
3 December 2020 Doris Lessing 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 say, ‘Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,’ reducing it to a simple formula.
