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
literature periods exciting
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
remember
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
girl mother growing-up
[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?
notebook country people
The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. ... I was really astounded that some people were shocked.
fiction realizing social
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
real should-have pleasure
for real pleasure a pleasure resort should have no one in it but its legitimate inhabitants, oneself, and perhaps one's friends.
distance writing people
The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.
fighting female needs
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work ...
notebook men thinking
[The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of "She is unfeminine", "She is a man-hater".
horse war divorce
On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East.
clever people stupidity
Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.
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.
men self use
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.
hate years important
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.