Quote

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

Doris Lessing

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Philosophy
Quality
Five
Make
Hundred
Novel
Thousand

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
Image
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
Image
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
Image
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
Image
I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
Image
If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
Image
Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing
Image
All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
Image
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
Image
I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
Doris Lessing
Image
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
Image
If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
Image
America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
Doris Lessing