56 quotes
There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies.
Salon interview (1997)
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Writers on Writing (1986)
What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the 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.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Literature is analysis after the event.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
The Golden Notebook (1962)
This has been going on for 30 years. I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush.
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
As I have said, this was not noticed.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Laughter is by definition healthy.
The Summer Before the Dark (1973)
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common … this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it.
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.
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:
"You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
The Golden Notebook (1962)
There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Salon interview (1997)
I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" […] that’s what my role was […] I can’t understand why I was so gullible.
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.
The Good Terrorist (1985)
And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
Salon interview (1997)