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
luck boulders bad-luck
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
running people world
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.
girl growing-up boys
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
writing thinking down-and
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
stars cutting people
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
september-11 ira terrible
September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
time space fiction
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
labels term critics
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
running self world
The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
people literature young
There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.
ordinary feels flats
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
thinking giving nobel
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
distance war world
Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
feminist want bears
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.