Doris Lessing

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

“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.”

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: 'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a s...”

“It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”

“It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”

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

“Laughter is by definition healthy.”

“What matters most is that we learn from living.”

“Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in l...”

“Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”

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

“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 uniq...”

“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 l...”

“I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utter...”

“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.”

“As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a pris...”

“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 a...”

“But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women...”

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.”

“I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a...”