British author (1919-2013)
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.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
London has changed enormously and so have the English in the past decade. They're more like Americans and more like Europeans, too. They're always eating out, and when they're at home they don't cook the way they did ten years ago. They're all sitting around in cafés, like the Continentals, drinking coffee and chattering and watching the world go by.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
DORIS LESSING
The New York Times, April 22, 1984
Women are slaves to their beauty.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The Progressive, June 1999
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme ... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
DORIS LESSING
"All Things Considered", NPR, October 11, 2007
Oh Christ. I couldn't care less.... I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise. I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off.
DORIS LESSING
"Doris Lessing oldest to win literature Nobel", The Toronto Star, October 12, 2007
Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.
DORIS LESSING
The Grass is Singing
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
All things come alike to all;
there is one event to the righteous,
and to the wicked;
to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
to him that sacrificeth,
and to him that sacrificeth not.
DORIS LESSING
Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher
Wisdom is better than weapons of war;
but one sinner destroyeth much good.
DORIS LESSING
Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher