Quotes About Author

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

I doubt if she's ever used a broom in her life," he said sarcastically. "Except to ride on, of course.

It is seldom that persons who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.

I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never.

report that Tad was better eased Lincoln's mind

A book," Nellie confided in her diary, "has more fascination for me than anything else.

The domestic scene," she admitted, referring not only to the coal dispute but to a rash of racial disturbances that had recently broken out, "is anything but encouraging and one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.

When he first returned to the Badlands in the summer of 1884, the austere landscape seemed to mirror his melancholy.

The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma.

The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.

Roosevelt saw everything, grasped the sense of everything, and formed an opinion on everything which he was eager to maintain at any risk.

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.

A writer is the conscience of the world.

The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

I watched his face put on that mask of bluff, goodnatured tolerance which is the mask of corruption in this particular time (for

I don't think there's a pattern anywhere - you are just making patterns, out of cowardice. I think people aren't good at all, they are cannibals, and when you get down to it no one cares about anyone else.

What is history? A record of misery, brutality and stupidity. That'a all. That's all it ever will be.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

I see I am falling into the self-punishing, cynical tone again. Yet how comforting this tone is, like a sort of poultice on a wound.

Pagan? Ah,that is a joyous word for the aridity of Godless modern man!

Intentions, yours or anyone else's, don't matter; they never matter and never excuse.

Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.

Whatever fascination Lymond held for her mother, it had no power at five in the morning.