Doris Lessing Quotes

You want people - I want people to relate to me as a character. I want them to go, 'That could have been me,' or, 'I know someone like that.'

I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

I really think the human experience is very similar for everyone; we're all doing slightly different versions of the same thing.

Just because you don't know if other people are experiencing the same thing as you are, it doesn't mean that it's not happening. Everybody doesn't necessarily share everything. Just know that what you're going through, other people are going through it, too.

I think we go through the world feeling alone and singular, and you forget that your one story is probably the same as millions of people's stories. Maybe with different specifics. But a lot of people experience the same things.

I do think that the strongest character is somebody that you can connect with to your personal self, or at least find the humanity in both of you and start from there.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.

I've found that the common humanity of people is the most relatable thing, and even if your stories are very specific about a different place, if you have a relatable core of humanity, people will go along with it.

Several years ago, when I was about to start a novel, I thought I might get some mileage out of the idea of a civilization in which people somehow felt - that is, they shared - all the pain and all the pleasure they caused one another.

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

I had discovered that I'm much less special than I thought I am. So whatever I find true for myself, other people might also relate to.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

No matter what you go through, if it's the truth, 9 times out of 10, somebody else has been through the same thing or is currently going through the same thing.

I love stories about people that, whatever situation they're in, you can relate to them in a way.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

I feel like the one insight that's extremely comforting to me about the world is that we all share the same pool of emotion that we draw from.

I just think that good stories are stories that reflect ourselves back at us and each other.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there.

As I got older, I started realizing that though people differ in skin tone, religious beliefs, cultures, and food, one thing we all have in common is emotions, so I tapped into emotions.

Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs. I wonder how they feel tonight.

Things that feel super personal actually feel really universal. It's sort of the more you really identify something specific within yourself, the more people connect to it because ultimately we are all connected in some way.

I'm glad that the lyrics reach people and make them understand that we're all the same, really.

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.