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. This is what our function is.

Doris Lessing

Categorized in : Thinking Book Jobs

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Doris Lessing

grateful prayer thank-you

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

Doris Lessing

recognition design impossible

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Doris Lessing

success opportunity inspirational

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

Doris Lessing

strong civilization thinking

Every child has the capacity to be everything.

Doris Lessing

being-yourself inspirational children

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

Doris Lessing

democracies-have real people

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

Doris Lessing

parent years

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

Doris Lessing

immature doe children

There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.

Doris Lessing

boring intelligent children

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

Doris Lessing

mean people thinking

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

Doris Lessing

creativity inspirational thinking

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Doris Lessing

time birthday years

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Doris Lessing

learning college memorable

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Doris Lessing

learning understanding education

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Doris Lessing

women numbers thinking

Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

Doris Lessing

envy moral behinds

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

Doris Lessing

terrible truth inspirational

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Doris Lessing

wiser wiser-you

It is my belief that children are full of understanding and know as much as and more than adults, until they are about seven, when they suddenly become stupid, like adults.

Doris Lessing

understanding stupid children

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

Doris Lessing

infant mere crime