574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

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

Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.

Mother's room, and mother's need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people's rights.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'