Doris Lessing

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.

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

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

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.

The thing is, I haven't changed at all.

I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.

I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.

When there's a war, people get married.

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

It's very interesting what you don't care about.

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.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

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.

I never stopped reading.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.

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.

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

I'm compulsive.

I have ideas that I will probably never write now.