It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious o — Doris Lessing

"Doris Lessing was nothing less than the goddess of literature herself for young women like myself aspiring to write in the 1970s. Her classic, The Golden Notebook, directly addressed the contradictions in womens lives in a way that was sophisticated, insightful and dispassionate.... When I started writing novels in the early 1980s, I often felt pressure from women to depict wholesome female role models. The pressure never worked, partly because Doris Lessing had gone before and blazed a path for all of us as readers, as women, as people."

"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."

"Everything’s cracking up", says Anna, the protagonist of Lessing’s masterpiece, a novel that takes its place in this list for its odd, visionary engagement with the issues and anxieties of its time and also for its extraordinary grip on the literary imagination of the late 20th century, when Lessing (who lived to November 2013) was in her prime. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes this novel as “one of the key texts of the women’s movement of the 1960s", a reductive description that would have infuriated Lessing, partly because she hated to be pigeonholed, and also because she understood fiction to be infinitely more varied and complex than one “movement". Lessing’s work has always been difficult to define: a mix of classical realism, science-fiction, parable, memoir, fantasy and polemic. The Golden Notebook has many of these elements."

"She might well wonder what took them so long. Doris Lessing is the ideal winner of the Nobel Prize. After all, the prize is about idealism, and was founded in the belief that writers can make the world a better place. Lessing can depict the world as a terrible place, peopled by terrorists, in which the women can be as violent as the men, and war can describe the planet entirely. But she never abandons the hope that the planet can be better, even if she has to imagine other planets to show how this is possible."

"It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda."

"In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream."

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you."

"yes is a pleasant country... love is a deeper season than reason"

"true lovers in each happening of their hearts live longer than all which and every who"

"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way."

"Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun Clothe you with rainbows? Who, with living flower Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer! and let the ice-plains echo, God! God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice! Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds! And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow, And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!"

"Unchanged within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others Wanings shouldst thou fret? Then only mightst thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight."