“I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.”
Marriage
“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.”
AgeAll Quotes by Doris Lessing
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
Learning“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“Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.”
Funny“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.”
Women“My father was in the First World War.”
War“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.”
Learning“I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.”
War“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.”
Travel“I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.”
Government“For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”
Alone“I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'”
Success“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”
Science“All my friends' mothers were appalling women.”
Women“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.”
Truth“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“It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.”
Money“What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.”
Religion“When there's a war, people get married.”
War“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
Truth