Quote

What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

Doris Lessing

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Book
Serious
Whole
Learning
Much
Realizing
People
Books
Disappeared
Literature
Respected
Society
Ordinary
Doesn
Realize
Past
Respect

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
Doris Lessing
Image
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
Image
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
Doris Lessing
Image
What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
Doris Lessing
Image
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
Image
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
Image
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
Image
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
Doris Lessing
Image
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
Image
Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
Image
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing
Image
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris Lessing
Image
Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
Doris Lessing
Image
Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
Image
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Image
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Doris Lessing