A Quote by Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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Periods of rapid and fundamental change were never favourable for literature. Significant works, have nearly always and everywhere been created in periods of stability, be it good or bad.
One of the things I always underscore when I teach criticism is that young critics, or would be critics, frequently have this illusion that if they write about music they're somehow part of music, or if they write about movies they're part of movies, or of they write about theater they're part of theater, or write about literature. Writing is a part of literature, we belong the species of literature. If you add all the music reviews together that have ever been written, they don't create two notes of music.
I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.
When critics ask you if you feel vindicated by other critics - I didn't like critics then, and I don't like them now. There you go. I've always been outside the mainstream, and it stayed that way.
In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended the differences that divided them and had recognized in their membership in the human race a common bond.
Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.
The hardest bits of my book to read were the easiest bits to write because they were the most immediate. Probably because I had never stopped thinking about them on some level. Those bits I was just channelling and those were the most exciting writing days. The bits I found harder were the bits that happen in between, you know, the rest of living. There were whole years, whole houses, that I just got rid of.
AMD's history is we've always had great technology. We've had periods of time where we've done really, really well, and we've had periods of time where we've done not so well. But most of the time we've done well, it's because we've had a leadership product or some technology where we were out in front before anybody else.
The parliamentary principle of decision by majorities only appears during quite short periods of history, and those are always periods of decadence in nations and States.
Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.
For of those [cities] that were great in earlier times, most of them have now become small, while those which were great in my time were small formerly.
Canada has always been a great place for literature. It's strong and growing stronger, and there will always be reading, and there will always be great writers.
I've been through periods of stress, turbulence in the market for over the course of my career, various times, and never in any of those other periods have we had the advantage of a strong economy underpinning the markets.
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don't even recognize that growth is happening...Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
The amazing thing now is that most of those so-called critics who were telling me to find my own voice seem to have lost theirs.
I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize.
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