Quotes by Doris Lessing

"Intelligence barred…quarrelling, sulking, anger, silences of withdrawal, accusations and tears. Above all, intelligence forbids tears."

"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."

"All my friends' mothers were appalling women."

"I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women."

"Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says."

"I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement."

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

"When there's a war, people get married."

"My father was in the First World War."

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

"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."

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

"I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents."

"I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'"

"There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful."

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

"Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time."

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

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

"It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel."