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Doris Lessing Quotes


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

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

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

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

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.

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

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

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

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

Literature is analysis after the event.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

Pearls mean tears.

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.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

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

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

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.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.