574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares ...

I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.

A story is how we construct our experiences.

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. This is what our function is.

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.

Bed is the best place for reading, thinking, or doing nothing.

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

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.