574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.

It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.