Quotes by Doris Lessing

About Doris Lessing:

Doris May Lessing is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.

Doris Lessing

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Doris Lessing

We stood, separated by space, certainly, in identical conditions of pleasant uncertainty and anticipation, and we both held our heart in our hands, all pink and palpitating and ready for pleasure and pain, and we were about to throw these hearts in e...

Doris Lessing

What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walk...

Doris Lessing

[...] students should be told that an effort is always required, when you start to read a serious author, to overcome mental laziness and reluctance, because you are about to enter the mind of someone who thinks differently from yourself. And that is...

Doris Lessing

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

Doris Lessing

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.

Doris Lessing

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

Doris Lessing

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Doris Lessing

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

Doris Lessing

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.

Doris Lessing

Author Bio

  • NameDoris Lessing
  • DescriptionBritish novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer
  • BornOctober 22, 1919
  • DiedNovember 17, 2013
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Playwright; Autobiographer
  • WorksThe Grass Is Singing; The Golden Notebook; The Good Terrorist; The Cleft
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Somerset Maugham Award; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; WH Smith Literary Award; Grinzane Cavour Prize; James Tait Black Memorial Prize; David Cohen Prize; Prince Of Asturia Literary Prize