"When they filmed [a television spot] in London, the director telephoned to ask how the film should begin so I suggested the sound of a certain dove, and so there we were in the zoo, where they filmed me looking at birds...at the rhinoceros (Africa, get it?)...walking into camera...away from camera...side shot...long shot...close shot...all this for hours and one of it was used. Well, it is jolly in the zoo and we all had a nice time. And then I was filmed walking along a street...looking into a more...
"When they filmed [a television spot] in London, the director telephoned to ask how the film should begin so I suggested the sound of a certain dove, and so there we were in the zoo, where they filmed me looking at birds...at the rhinoceros (Africa, get it?)...walking into camera...away from camera...side shot...long shot...close shot...all this for hours and one of it was used. Well, it is jolly in the zoo and we all had a nice time. And then I was filmed walking along a street...looking into a bookshop window...gazing pensively at my own books. The trouble is, you get beaten down by the weight of their dullness."less...
"For me the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of Tolstoy, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Turgenev, Chekhov; the work of the great realists. I define realism as art which springs so vigorously and naturally from a strongly-held, though not necessarily intellectually-defined, view of life that it absorbs symbolism. I hold the view that the realist novel, the realist story, is the highest form of prose writing; higher than and out of the reach of any compa more...
"For me the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of Tolstoy, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Turgenev, Chekhov; the work of the great realists. I define realism as art which springs so vigorously and naturally from a strongly-held, though not necessarily intellectually-defined, view of life that it absorbs symbolism. I hold the view that the realist novel, the realist story, is the highest form of prose writing; higher than and out of the reach of any comparison with expressionism, impressionism, symbolism, naturalism, or any other ism."less...
"It's a bit of an albatross around my neck, because I do think I've written some interesting books apart from that. And partly because I don't like it being seen so narrowly as a feminist book. I don't think it is a narrow feminist book."
"He's not a difficult writer, he's one of the funny writers. I have been reading him for years and have never found him dense or difficult. He must have had the plan of this novel in his mind for years, an achievement in itself. I don't accept that parts of the novel are difficult, not at all. You can't read Proust over the weekend--he needs application, but he's a revelation."
Doris Lessing was born in the area that was then Persia, later Iran. Her father, a farmer, subsequently moved the family to Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), where she reluctantly attended the Roman Catholic Convent Girls' High School. As soon as she was able, Lessing left school and began working, first as a nursemaid and then as a secretary and typist. She married and had two children with Frank Charles Wisdom, but left them in 1943. Her politics grew increasingly left-wing, and she became involved more...
Doris Lessing was born in the area that was then Persia, later Iran. Her father, a farmer, subsequently moved the family to Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), where she reluctantly attended the Roman Catholic Convent Girls' High School. As soon as she was able, Lessing left school and began working, first as a nursemaid and then as a secretary and typist. She married and had two children with Frank Charles Wisdom, but left them in 1943. Her politics grew increasingly left-wing, and she became involved in several activist groups, which she documents fictionally in her autobiographical Martha Quest series. For several years she was a member of the Communist Party but became increasingly disillusioned and left it altogether in 1954. Many of her early fiction works, set in Africa, have been implicit criticisms of racism; in 1956, Lessing was declared a prohibited alien in South Africa (and didn't return until 1995, when she traveled there to visit her daughter and grandchildren). Lessing's most celebrated novel by far is THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK (1962), an experimental work in which a woman's multiple selves are presented as she tries to find a way out of her emotionally stunted life in a hypocritical society. In addition to writing fiction and autobiography, Lessing has experimented with a form of science fiction she calls "inner-space fiction"; she has also collaborated with the composer Philip Glass, providing the librettos for two operas based on her works and has written extensively about her love of cats, in PARTICULARLY CATS and "...AND RUFUS. In 1995, Lessing received an honorary degree from Harvard University, and in 2007 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.less...
Never finished it. Didn't manage. Disappointed really...