Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Design Quotes

2. “Small things amuse small minds.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

4. “Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.”

— Doris Lessing

5. “That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way.”

— Doris Lessing

6. “People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”

— Doris Lessing

7. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”

— Doris Lessing

8. “You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can’t be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”

— Doris Lessing

9. “Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

— Doris Lessing

10. “Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”

— Doris Lessing

11. “We’ve got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.”

— Doris Lessing

12. “Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

— Doris Lessing

13. “Mother’s room, and mother’s need for privacy become a valuable lesson in respect for other people’s rights.”

— Doris Lessing

14. “You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.”

— Doris Lessing

15. “I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.”

— Doris Lessing

16. “A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.”

— Doris Lessing

17. “Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.”

— Doris Lessing

18. “The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.”

— Doris Lessing

19. “Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.”

— Doris Lessing

20. “There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.”

— Doris Lessing

21. “As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.”

— Doris Lessing

22. “It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.”

— Doris Lessing

23. “A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.”

— Doris Lessing

24. “All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.”

— Doris Lessing

25. “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

26. “The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world’s publishing industry to jump to their tune.”

— Doris Lessing

27. “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

28. “The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.”

— Doris Lessing

29. “If what we think now is different from what we thought then, we can take it for granted that what we think in a year will be different again.”

— Doris Lessing

30. “We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.”

— Doris Lessing

31. “Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.”

— Doris Lessing

32. “What is a hero without love for mankind.”

— Doris Lessing

33. “Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.”

— Doris Lessing

34. “And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about, unnoticed and invisible.”

— Doris Lessing

35. “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.”

— Doris Lessing

36. “Laughter is by definition healthy.”

— Doris Lessing

37. “Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.”

— Doris Lessing

38. “All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.”

— Doris Lessing

39. “I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.”

— Doris Lessing

40. “We are all creatures of the stars.”

— Doris Lessing

41. “With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one – but no one at all – can tell you what to read and when and how.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Reading Quotes

42. “What of October, that ambiguous month, the month of tension, the unendurable month?”

— Doris Lessing

43. “In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

44. “Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.”

— Doris Lessing

45. “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

46. “The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.”

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

49. “You simply don’t get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you’ve been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.”

— Doris Lessing

50. “For women like me, integrity isn’t chastity, it isn’t fidelity, it isn’t any of the old words. Integrity is the orgasm. That is something I haven’t any control over.”

— Doris Lessing