Top 116 Quotes by Doris Lessing

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

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

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

All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.

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

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

I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.

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.

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.