Quotes by Doris Lessing

I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women’s movement.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says.

I don’t think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.

All my friends’ mothers were appalling women.

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.

My father was in the First World War.

When there’s a war, people get married.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

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.

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