Quotes from Doris Lessing

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

What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

Pearls mean tears.

I'm just a story teller.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

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.

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

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

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.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

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.

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.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

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

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.