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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
Everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!
God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
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.
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
I am your original autodidact.
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.
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
I'm compulsive.
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.
I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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.
I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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.
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
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.
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
It's very interesting what you don't care about.
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement.
When there's a war, people get married.
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
My father was in the First World War.
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.
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.
What is a hero without love for mankind.
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so', reducing it to a simple formula.
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 thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
The thing is, I haven't changed at all.
I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world', but we had children by the dozen and got married.
I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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.
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