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
giving interviews spend-time
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
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.
giving-up creative-writers creative-writing
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
giving grace roles
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
men ideas giving
But there is no doubt that to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense. For instance, decade after decade bright young men and women emerge from their universities able to say proudly: 'Of course I know nothing about German literature.' It is the mode. The Victorians knew everything about German literature, but were able with a clear conscience not to know much about the French.
giving profit exploitation
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
giving way emotion
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
winning giving lovely
It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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.
men giving landscape
Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.
capable english-writer love pretend quite terrible work
What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate, that you don't need love when you do or that you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.
oneself persuade sin
There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best
education novels sorry threw wrote
I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
dictates fiction form problem science
I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.