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Doris Lessing Biography

Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. She was born to British parents in Iran, where she lived until 1925. Her family then moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she remained until moving in 1949 to London, England. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950), the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69), The Golden Notebook (1962), The Good Terrorist (1985), and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).

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Doris Lessing Quotes

There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

Line, Lines, Past, Seek, Women

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, Nobel, Probably, Think, Thinking

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to.

Caught, Emotion, Emotions, Matter, Want

The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.

Nobel, Prize, Running, Self, Tune, Tunes

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

Love, Trust, Angel, Faults, Friend

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough. . . People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

Book, Love, Part, Thinking, Writers, Writing

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

Autobiography, Interim, Report, Reports

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes.

Drama, Eye, Like, Lives, Present, Taken

The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

Fool, Lips, Men, Mouths, Wise, Words

I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.

Contact, Human, Solitude, Treasure

What matters most is that we learn from living.

Learn, Life, Living, Matters, What Matters, Witty

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

Air, Climbing, Recklessness, Stars, Straight, Walked

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting.

Change, Eye, Morning, Part, Running, Society

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.

Cowards, Experience, Numbers, Small, Thinking, Women

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

Boys, Girl, Growing Up, Man, Wonderful, Young

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.

Giving Up, Hard Work, Teach, Telling, Truth, Writing

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don't know - Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.

Army, Information, Philosophy, Should Have, Thousand

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.

Growing Up, Shares, Understanding, Unique, Women

I would not be at all surprised to find out. . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

Affect, Building, Dimensions, Guess, Way, Ways

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

Book, Climates, Confined, Democratic, Reading, Thought Provoking

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