I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
— Doris Lessing
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
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.
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
I haven't got the energy to write now.
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
You know, 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.
I'm compulsive.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
My father was in the First World War.
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Small things amuse small minds.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
I'm just a story teller.
I never stopped reading.
A story is how we construct our experiences.
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Literature is analysis after the event.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
The human race has been telling stories since it began.
I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
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.
Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Pearls mean tears.
