DORIS LESSING QUOTES III

British author (1919-2013)

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

DORIS LESSING

Shikasta

Tags: language


Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook


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


In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

DORIS LESSING

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside


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

Tags: youth


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


You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

DORIS LESSING

Time Bites


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


There are certain things I don't talk about. I have kept diaries, of course, but they can't be read for quite a long time. What will emerge when people read them? I can't imagine that anything will emerge that can't be deduced from reading any of my books now. This is why I'm always curious about people who are fascinated by writers' lives. It seems to me that we're always in our books, quite nakedly. I wonder, too, does the private life really matter? Who cares what is known about you and what isn't? Even when you make public something that's been private, most people don't get it -- not unless they're the same generation and have gone through more or less the same experiences. So, in a sense, we're all private, by definition.

DORIS LESSING

interview, The Progressive, June 1999


What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.

DORIS LESSING

The Old Age of El Magnifico


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


One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook

Tags: philosophy


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

Tags: writing


I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook


I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he would begin to run. I knew this with my intuition, and yet I sat there in my dark room, looking at the hazed wet brilliance of the purple London night sky, longing with my whole being.

DORIS LESSING

The Golden Notebook


If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

DORIS LESSING

Particularly Cats

Tags: cats


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.

DORIS LESSING

The New York Times, April 22, 1984

Tags: dreams


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


I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

DORIS LESSING

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Tags: literature


I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.

DORIS LESSING

The Paris Review, spring 1988