Quotes from Doris Lessing

The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

I am your original autodidact.

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.

I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

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.

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

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.