Zitat des Tages von Doris Lessing:
What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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.
I haven't got the energy to write now.
I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
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.
You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.
When there's a war, people get married.
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.
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
Small things amuse small minds.
Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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.
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
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.
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
Pearls mean tears.
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
Literature is analysis after the event.
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.