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Doris Lessing [1919-2013] English

Rank: 101
Writer, Novelist

Doris May Lessing CH was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives.

Learning, War, Work, Age, Best, Chance, Change, Great, Imagination, Marriage, Peace, Space, Trust, Truth, Wisdom

Quote	Tags	Rank
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.		101
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.		102
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.		103
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.	Great, Truth, Work	104
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.	Learning	105
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.	Trust	106
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.	Work	107
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.	War	108
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.		109
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.	Peace	110
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.	Marriage	111
I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.		112
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.	War	113
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.		114
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.	Age, Change	115
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.		116
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.	Best	117
Small things amuse small minds.		118
I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.		119
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.		120
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.		121
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.		122
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.		123
You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.		124
When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.		125
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.	Learning	126
Pearls mean tears.		201
A story is how we construct our experiences.		202
What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.		203
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.		204
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.	Wisdom	205
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.		206
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.	Space	207
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.		208
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.		209
What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.		210
What is a hero without love for mankind.		211
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!	Chance	212
My father was in the First World War.		213
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.		214
Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.		215
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.		216
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'		217
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.		218
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.		219
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.		220
When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.		221
I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.		222
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.		223
Literature is analysis after the event.		224
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.		225
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.		226
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.		301
Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!		302
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.		303
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.		304
The human race has been telling stories since it began.		305
I never stopped reading.		306
God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.		307
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.		308
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.		309
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.		310
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.		311
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.		312
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.		313
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.	Imagination	314
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.		315
When there's a war, people get married.		316
It's very interesting what you don't care about.		317
I am your original autodidact.		318
I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.		319
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.		320
It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'		321
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.		322
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.		323
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.		324
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.		325
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.		326
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.		401
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.		402
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.		403
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.		404
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.		405
I have ideas that I will probably never write now.		406
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.		407
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.		408
I'm compulsive.		409
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.		410
I'm just a story teller.		411
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.		412
I haven't got the energy to write now.		413
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.		414
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.		415
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.		416
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.		417
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.		418
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.		419
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.		420
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.		421
We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.		422
The thing is, I haven't changed at all.		423
I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.		424
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.		425
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.		426
If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.		501
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.		502
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.		503
You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.		504
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.		505
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.		506
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.		507
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.		508
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.		509
I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.		510
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.		511
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.		512

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