Quotes from Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

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

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.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

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

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

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.

We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

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

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.

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

I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.

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

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.