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.

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.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

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.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

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.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

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.

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

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.

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.

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.