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.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

Literature is analysis after the event.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

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.

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

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

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.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.