574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot.

I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I’ve been much happier unmarried than married.

I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

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

What I did have, which others perhaps didn’t, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.

Nostalgia for what? I don’t know. Because I’d rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the ‘Anna’ of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn’t want to see.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.

After a certain age – and for some of us that can be very young – there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before...

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.