Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 12

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.

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.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

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

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety.

London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.

Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.

Her own contempt for any forms of pressure society might put on her was so profound and instinctive that she as instinctively despised anyone who paid tribute to them.

People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.

So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.

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?

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

I woke up one morning, and I couldn't move my arm. It was the oddest thing, the paralysis. I called up a friend and said, "I think I've had a stroke," and, in fact, that's what my doctor told me. It wasn't terrible, but it was enough to scare me. Now I think about death all the time. I have my death arm, my right arm.

I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.

A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.

Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.

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

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.