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
love trust angel
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
book writing past
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
want matter emotion
How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to...
book reading thought-provoking
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
book reading doors
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
worry fame posthumous
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
writing animal way
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
life witty what-matters
What matters most is that we learn from living.
children lying book
Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read.
winning giving lovely
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
song humanity stories
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
jobs truth writing
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
giving-up writing hard-work
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.
love hero mankind
What is a hero without love for mankind.