I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
— Doris Lessing
I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
I am your original autodidact.
When there's a war, people get married.
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
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.
When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'
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.
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
It's very interesting what you don't care about.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
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.
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
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.
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.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
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.
The thing is, I haven't changed at all.
We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
