Doris Lessing Quotes - Page 6

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.

Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

Laughter is by definition healthy.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

Literature is analysis after the event.

My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.

Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.

Better Counsel comes overnight.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.