Doris Lessing

“Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.”

“My father was in the First World War.”

“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.”

“Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.”

“September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.”

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

“This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We...”

“Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.”

“You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.”

“The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.”

“You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.”

“Pearls mean tears.”

“I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.”

“All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.”

“Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.”

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

“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.”

“I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that w...”

“We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.”

“For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”