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Doris Lessing 1919 - 2013

On men and women: "Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative – despite what current ideology says. Of course men and women are different. 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."

On her relationship with her mother: "We hated each other … We were quarrelling right from the start. She wouldn't have chosen me as a daughter. I was landed on her. I must have driven her mad. She thought everything I did was to annoy her. She had an incredible capacity for self-delusion."

On marriage: "Not one of my talents."

On motherhood: "There is no boredom like that of an intelligent woman who spends all day with a very small child." 

On leaving her two children in Africa when she emigrated to England in 1949: "While it was a terrible thing to do, it was right to do it."

On communism: "Well that was a great mistake, wasn't it?"

On the "war on terror": "11 September was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible."

On the war in Iraq: "How was it possible that we allowed this monstrous war? Why do we allow wars still? Now we are bogged down in Iraq in an impossible situation. I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars."

On Zimbabwe: "If only it had been possible to say, 'I will only support you if you behave properly once you get into power instead of turning into a murderous beast.' … Instead, we have this ugly little tyrant, Mugabe. An odious man."

On contemporary British fiction: "Small, well-shaped and with too much left out."

On feminism: "I'm not interested in being a feminist icon. If you are a woman and you think at all, you are going to have to write about it, otherwise you aren't writing about the time you are living in. What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible."

On The Golden Notebook: "The second line is 'Everything's cracking up.'That is what The Golden Notebook is about!" 

On its afterlife: "This book has got a sort of charge to it. It keeps popping up … and I have to say 'My God, this book has got something. It has got a quality, a vitality.'"

On old age: "I really do think enough is enough. I feel I've lived too long. You just go on so ... I look at all these years, years, years that I have lived through."

On being told she had won the Nobel in 2007: "Oh Christ!"

On winning the Nobel: "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."

On the Swedish Academy: "The whole thing is a joke. The Nobel prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune. I know several people who have won and you don't do anything else for a year but Nobel. They are always coming out with new torments for me…"

On her legacy: "I've met girls who say 'My mother told me to read you, and my grandmother.' That really is something, isn't it?"

The Guardian - December 28th, 2013 
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/28/literary-giants-died-2013