Doris Lessing Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• 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

  Book, Writing, Criticism

• Literature is analysis after the event.

  Doris Lessing

  Events, Analysis, Literature

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

• 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

  Doris Lessing

  Women, Love Is, Literature

• For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

  Doris Lessing

  Generations, Literature, Found

  Doris Lessing, Doris May Lessing (1977). “A proper marriage”

• Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

  Doris Lessing

  Rivers, Literature, Oblivion

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “The Golden Notebook”, HarperCollins Publishers

• 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

  Men, Ideas, Giving

  Doris May Lessing (1989). “The Doris Lessing Reader”, Jonathan Cape

• People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

  Doris Lessing

  Thinking, People, Mind

• There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

  Doris Lessing

  People, Literature, Young

• 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.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Self, Female

  Doris May Lessing (1996). “Putting questions differently: interviews with Doris Lessing, 1964-1994”

• 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

  Book, Past, People

• The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

  Doris Lessing

  Literature, Periods, Exciting

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