574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

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.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.

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.

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

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

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.

Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.