574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It’s a cruel and evil government.

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

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world’s publishing industry to jump to their tune.

All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven’t examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.