Quotes from 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.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

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

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 do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

When there's a war, people get married.

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.

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

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.

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

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

I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

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.

All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.