Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 10

When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.'

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

As soon as I got the Nobel Prize my back collapsed and I was in hospital.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.

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

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.

Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of society, a type of person, not yet admitted to the general literate consciousness.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.

It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.

I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.

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.

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.