Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CHwas a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 October 1919
people literature young
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
ordinary feels flats
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
thinking giving nobel
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
distance war world
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
feminist want bears
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
war people married
When there's a war, people get married.
southern empires young
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
mets bores
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
emotional dancing unhappy
It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
bible war weapons
Wisdom is better than weapons of war; but one sinner destroyeth much good.
dream two humanity
there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
thinking citizens novelists
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.
real air feelings
You have to deduce a person's real feelings about a thing by a smile she does not know is on her face, by the way bitterness tightens muscles at a mouth's corner, or the way air is allowed to flow from the lungs.
book shapes patterns
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.