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
intelligence tears
Intelligence forbids tears.
inspiration writing thinking
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
men incredibles nonsense
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
men chance
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
thought-provoking youth provoking
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
daughter two towns
I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
red married servant
You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
believe may duration
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
dream writing sleep
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
dimensions way building
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
kids thinking parent
I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents.
superstitions worst tolerable
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
writing different firsts
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
perspective people awful
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.