Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 4

What is a hero without love for mankind.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference.

I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing

I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad euphoria. I wondered what had happened to my hard-headed friends? Almost everyone I knew was drunk on this great white hope. The next time I was in New York, no one had a good word to say about Clinton, but everyone was in love with Hillary. She was the last word. It's all so unreal. Of course, it's no different in England. Here everyone was besotted with Tony Blair. He was a new face. Do people never learn?

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

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.

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.

We are all creatures of the stars.

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

We always seem to be surprised by events, especially by catastrophes, but also by wonderful events. Look at 1990, the year that the Soviet Union collapsed and apartheid in South Africa collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. I don't know anyone who foresaw those events. It seems to me that as a species we are constantly trying to adapt ourselves to the unexpected. In the meantime, we talk as if we are in control, and we're not. This seems to me to be the truth about the twentieth century.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.