Doris Lessing Quotes

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Doris Lessing

Profession : Writer

Birth : October 22, 1919

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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 don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

Pearls mean tears.

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.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.

Doris Lessing

I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!

Doris Lessing

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

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

Doris Lessing

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

Doris Lessing

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

Doris Lessing

A story is how we construct our experiences.

Doris Lessing