“Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”
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Famous Doris Lessing Quotes
“Small things amuse small minds.”
Source: Stories
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
Source: Martha Quest: A Complete Novel
Source: The Four-Gated City
“I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.”
“I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.”
“I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.”
“I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.”
“We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.”
“All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.”
“I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.”
“I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.”
“I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.”
Source: On Cats
“In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.”
Source: The Grass is Singing
“It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.”
“It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.”
“It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.”
“Literature is analysis after the event.”
Source: The Golden Notebook
“The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.”
“There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.”
“Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.”