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
Better Counsel comes overnight.
motivational men long
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
rivers literature oblivion
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
giving-up creative-writers creative-writing
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
bothered destroyed
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
desire shifting youth
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.
book writing firsts
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.
women real silly
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.
women slave women-beauty
Women are slaves to their beauty.
war past people
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.
war years long
So a war begins. Into a peace-time life, comes an announcement, a threat. A bomb drops somewhere, potential traitors are whisked off quietly to prison. And for some time, days, months, a year perhaps, life has a peace-time quality, into which war-like events intrude. But when a war has been going on for a long time, life is all war, every event has the quality of war, nothing of peace remains.
people chinese body
We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
philosophy should-have quality
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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.