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
wise men fool
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
cutting names people
Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
dark views white
The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
sticks talent capacity
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
mean self towns
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
envy moral behinds
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
two people needs
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
mother strokes died
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
war father world
My father was in the First World War.
winning europe bloody
I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
writing unhappy
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
feminist active has-beens
I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
mother war writing
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
mother brother frustrated
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.