British author (1919-2013)
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
DORIS LESSING
Under My Skin
We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
The book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty -- and vice versa.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook
I was so immersed in writing [The Golden Notebook], that I didn't think about how it might be received. I was involved not merely because it was hard to write--keeping the plan of it in my head I wrote it from start to end, consecutively, and it was difficult--but because of what I was learning as I wrote. Perhaps giving oneself a tight structure, making limitations for oneself, squeezes out new substances where you least expect it. All sorts of ideas and experiences I didn't recognize as mine emerged when writing. The actual time of writing, then, and not only the experiences that had gone into the writing, was really traumatic: it changed me. Emerging from this crystallizing process, handing the manuscript to publisher and friends, I learned that I had written a tract about the sex war, and fast discovered that nothing I said then could change that diagnosis.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
DORIS LESSING
The Sunday Times, May 10, 1992
We are several people fitted inside each other. Chinese boxes. Our bodies are the outside box. Or the inside one if you like.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Grammar Girl's 101 Words Every High School Graduate Needs to Know
I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.
DORIS LESSING
interview, Salon, November 11, 1997
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
DORIS LESSING
Shikasta
People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother. She was always wanting us to be something. For a long time she wanted me to be a musician, because she had been a rather good musician. I didn't have much talent for it. But everybody had to have music lessons then. She was always pushing us. And, of course, in one way it was very good, because children need to be pushed. But she would then take possession of whatever it was. So you had to protect yourself. But I think probably every child has to find out the way to possess their own productions.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988
The truth was, she was becoming more and more uncomfortably conscious not only that the things she said, and a good many of the things she thought, had been taken down off a rack and put on, but that what she really felt was something else again.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
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.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, An Uncommon Scold
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
DORIS LESSING
Partisan Review, 1973
As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already moulded by a system: he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don't wish to subject themselves to further moulding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won't be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave--that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn't like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed--yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.
DORIS LESSING
A Small Personal Voice
In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.
DORIS LESSING
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
DORIS LESSING
introduction, The Golden Notebook