Doris Lessing
British writer, born Doris May Tayler.
Laughter is by definition healthy.
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.
The two women were alone in the London flat.
"The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."
Mrs. Lessing's view of recent politics is not everyone's. Her view of the future (inevitably brutish and painful) is that it is the present: that we are all hypnotized, awaiting cataclysms which we are in fact living through now; that we are now as we run and read in the process of a rapid evolution; that we are mutating fast but can't see it, the chief characteristic of our race being its inability to see what is under its nose; that historians and scientists, in their timid traditionalism, feed our fantasy view of ourselves suppressing truths about the human condition, about madness, about sanity, about the essential nature of the mind.
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all in one way or another obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.
What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then we went on dancing.
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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.
What they [critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction] didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
I was taken around and shown things as a "useful idiot" ... thats what my role was
I cant understand why I was so gullible.
For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
The worst of superstitions is to think
One's own most bearable.
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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.
Literature is analysis after the event.