Doris Lessing quotes

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

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

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.

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

What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.

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.

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.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

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.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

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.

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

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've 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 seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.