574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

Y’know, there’s a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything’s cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don’t believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, ‘Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time’. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, ‘We know that what we’re doing is wrong.

I don’t think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn’t that terrible.

I’m very unhappy when I’m not writing.

Do you imagine, Ted, that if you are kind to servants you are going to advance the cause of socialism?” “Yes,” Ted had said. “Then I can’t help you,” Willi had said, with a shrug, meaning there was no hope for him. Jimmy.

It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: ‘Of course I know nothing about German literature.’ It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.

What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

They turned into wrong and destructive paths believing that they were better than others whose belief in self-interest was open and expressed, better because they, and they alone, knew how the practical affairs of the planet should be conducted. An emotional reaction to the sufferings of Shikasta seemed to them a sufficient qualification for curing them.