Doris Lessing on writing

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

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.

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.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778

• Love

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin1706–1790

• Reading