Quotes from 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. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

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

None of you [men] ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

When there's a war, people get married.

My father was in the First World War.

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.

Better Counsel comes overnight.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life, but in a new way.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all.

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.

What's terrible is to pretend that the 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.