Quotes by Doris Lessing

"I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married."

"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."

"There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't."

"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best."

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

"The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion."