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 More Quotes by Doris Lessing More Quotes From Doris Lessing A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. Doris Lessing women literature love-is And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.' Doris Lessing criticism writing book Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work. Doris Lessing female-writers fighting needs On the news two dozen events of fantastically different importance are announced in exactly the same tone of voice. The voice doesn't discriminate between a divorce, a horse race, a war in the Middle East. Doris Lessing divorce horse war I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. Doris Lessing optimism writing thinking It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it. Doris Lessing borders easy country The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative. Doris Lessing hurt dream war Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment. Doris Lessing young-writers judgment advice [Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . . Doris Lessing encounters people thinking 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. Doris Lessing unions country people We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter. Doris Lessing gold matter doe The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. Doris Lessing running long book The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts. Doris Lessing war people thinking Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. Doris Lessing interim autobiography thinking It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. Doris Lessing dying conscious people Don't read a book out of its right time for you. Doris Lessing bookshops right-time book 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. Doris Lessing giving men ideas An interim report - that is what an autobiography is. Doris Lessing interim reports autobiography What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it. Doris Lessing talent sticks capacity What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. Doris Lessing kitchen men long
