Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 5

It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.

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.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.

Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

But 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. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.

This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.

My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Small things amuse small minds.

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.

The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country... I was really astounded that some people were shocked.

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time 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.

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.