574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire -- nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.