9 Doris Lessing Quotes on Literature

Doris Lessing quotes on literature

5. Literature is analysis after the event.

8. You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous and self-indulgent, like the relationships between women when there are no men around. They make each other presents, and they have little feasts, and nobody punishes anyone else. This is the female way of going along when there are no men about or when men are not in the ascendant.

12. There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

13. Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

17. 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.

32. 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.

33. The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means toward it.

61. She might well wonder what took them so long. Doris Lessing is the ideal winner of the Nobel Prize. After all, the prize is about idealism, and was founded in the belief that writers can make the world a better place. Lessing can depict the world as a terrible place, peopled by terrorists, in which the women can be as violent as the men, and war can describe the planet entirely. But she never abandons the hope that the planet can be better, even if she has to imagine other planets to show how this is possible.

62. Doris Lessing was nothing less than the goddess of literature herself for young women like myself aspiring to write in the 1970s. Her classic, The Golden Notebook, directly addressed the contradictions in women's lives in a way that was sophisticated, insightful and dispassionate.... When I started writing novels in the early 1980s, I often felt pressure from women to depict wholesome female role models. The pressure never worked, partly because Doris Lessing had gone before and blazed a path for all of us as readers, as women, as people.