British author (1919-2013)
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
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The New York Times, April 22, 1984
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
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
I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.
DORIS LESSING
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
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 2006
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
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988