“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
“Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.”
WomenAll Quotes by Doris Lessing
“I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of 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“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”
Learning“For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”
Alone“There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.”
Best“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 hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.”
Government“September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.”
History“Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.”
Women“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”
Truth“All my friends' mothers were appalling women.”
Women“I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'”
Success“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.”
Society“It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.”
Money“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“Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”
Trust“What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.”
Religion“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”
Science“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