Doris Lessing: A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of an...

Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar.

Doris Lessing

infant mere crime

I was in New York when Clinton was elected the first time, and everyone I knew was in a state of mad euphoria. I wondered what had happened to my hard-headed friends? Almost everyone I knew was drunk on this great white hope. The next time I was in New York, no one had a good word to say about Clinton, but everyone was in love with Hillary. She was the last word. It's all so unreal. Of course, it's no different in England. Here everyone was besotted with Tony Blair. He was a new face. Do people never learn?

Doris Lessing

new-york white people

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Doris Lessing

trust angel love

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Doris Lessing

mankind hero love

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

Doris Lessing

golden-notebook cannibal people

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Doris Lessing

inspiration lying children

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.

Doris Lessing

pills feminism two

I'm going to make the obvious point that maybe the word neurotic means the condition of being highly conscious and developed. The essence of neurosis is conflict. But the essence of living now, fully, not blocking off to what goes on, is conflict. In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.

Doris Lessing

block essence mean

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

Doris Lessing

inspirational love needs

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Doris Lessing

truth writing jobs

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.

Doris Lessing

giving-up hard-work writing

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

Doris Lessing

writing

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.

Doris Lessing

care important writing

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

Doris Lessing

succeed process book

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

Doris Lessing

talent belief children

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.

Doris Lessing

stage revolutionary movement

When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.

Doris Lessing

interviews television looks

Literature is analysis after the event.

Doris Lessing

analysis events literature

I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.

Doris Lessing

posthumous worry fame

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

Doris Lessing

factual records fiction

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.