British author (1919-2013)
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. 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.
DORIS LESSING
The New York Times, April 22, 1984
I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
DORIS LESSING
"A Notorious Life", Salon, November 11, 1997
I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this--that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past. But that very little of it has been put into effect. There has been this great explosion of information about ourselves. The information is the result of mankind's still infant ability to look at itself objectively. It concerns our behaviour patterns. The sciences in question are sometimes called the behavioural sciences and are about how we function in groups and as individuals, not about how we like to think we behave and function, which is often very flattering. But about how we can be observed to be behaving when observed as dispassionately as when we observe the behaviour of other species. These social or behavioural sciences are precisely the result of our capacity to be detached and unflattering about ourselves. There is this great mass of new information from universities, research institutions and from gifted amateurs, but our ways of governing ourselves haven't changed. Our left hand does not know--does not want to know--what our right hand does. This is what I think is the most extraordinary thing there is to be seen about us, as a species, now. And people to come will marvel at it, as we marvel at the blindness and inflexibility of our ancestors.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
All things come alike to all;
there is one event to the righteous,
and to the wicked;
to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
to him that sacrificeth,
and to him that sacrificeth not.
DORIS LESSING
Ecclesiastes or, The Preacher
Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
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.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Writers on Writing
I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
Often the mass emotions are those which seem the noblest, best and most beautiful. And yet, inside a year, five years, a decade, five decades, people will be asking, "How could you have believed that?" because events will have taken place that will have banished the said mass emotions to the dustbin of history.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
What he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Grammar Girl's 101 Words Every High School Graduate Needs to Know
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.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
People who have lived through a war know that as it approaches, an at first secret, unacknowledged, elation begins, as if an almost inaudible drum is beating ... an awful, illicit, violent excitement is abroad. Then the elation becomes too strong to be ignored or overlooked: then everyone is possessed by it.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
I think people are always looking for gurus. It's the easiest thing in the world to become a guru. It's quite terrifying. I once saw something fascinating here in New York. It must have been in the early seventies--guru time. A man used to go and sit in Central Park, wearing elaborate golden robes. He never once opened his mouth, he just sat. He'd appear at lunchtime. People appeared from everywhere, because he was obviously a holy man, and this went on for months. They just sat around him in reverent silence. Eventually he got fed up with it and left. Yes. It's as easy as that.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 2006
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
You know, it never occurred to me until afterwards that everybody in these books is a refugee. But everyone is running from drought or flood or civil war. I do think a lot about them. You know, not far from here is a road where refugees of all kinds line the roads, and people go there to pick up a plumber or carpenter or something. This isn't an official thing, you know, but there they are. A friend of mine goes there when she wants anything. They are all very skilled people.
DORIS LESSING
interview, The San Francisco Chronicle, January 15, 2006