Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.
Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.
When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
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.
for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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 think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
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.
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.
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
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.
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.
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.
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
After a certain age - and for some of us that can be very young - there are no new people, beasts, dreams, faces, events: it has all happened before.
I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.