Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a… - Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

[On her first marriage ] I don't think marriages are like that now. It's when you walk into a role. The life was all laid down, what you ate, everything you did, and I went through it all as if it were a role in a play, really, and I hated it bitterly.

Sometimes I dislike women I dislike us all because of our capacity for not thinking when it suits us...

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions — and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas — can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.