Doris Lessing Quotes

Doris Lessing (99)

Birth:	22nd October, 1919
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Biographer, Novelist, Poet, Writer, Playwriter

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Today's Anniversary - 19th June

Births

• 1954 - Richard Wilkins
• 1623 - Blaise Pascal
• 1572 - John Donne
• 1882 - Clarence Stein
• 1910 - Abe Fortas

Deaths

• 1956 - Thomas John Watson, Sr.
• 1820 - Joseph Banks
• 1966 - Ed Wynn
• 1786 - Nathanael Greene
• 1811 - Samuel Chase

• 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Inspirational

• 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Truth
• 

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writer, Learn

• Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• When you’re young you think that you’re going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What society doesn’t realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don’t now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, ‘Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,’ reducing it to a simple formula.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized

• My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.

  Doris Lessing

  Topics in Uncategorized