{"id":61579,"date":"2013-10-22T15:15:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T19:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=61579"},"modified":"2013-10-22T13:48:20","modified_gmt":"2013-10-22T17:48:20","slug":"clairvoyance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/22\/clairvoyance\/","title":{"rendered":"Clairvoyance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dorislessinglarge\"<\/a><\/p>\n

LESSING<\/center><\/p>\n

I know people say things like, \u201cI regard you as rather a prophet.\u201d But there\u2019s nothing I\u2019ve said that hasn\u2019t been, for example, in the New Scientist<\/em> for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/center><\/p>\n

You write better.<\/p>\n

LESSING<\/center><\/p>\n

Well, I was going to say, I present it in a more interesting way. I do think that sometimes I hit a kind of wavelength\u2014though I think a lot of writers do this\u2014where I anticipate events. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s very much, really. I think a writer\u2019s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone\u2019s read a book of mine, they\u2019ve had\u2014I don\u2019t know what\u2014the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That\u2019s what I think writers are for. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

\u2014Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LESSING I know people say things like, \u201cI regard you as rather a prophet.\u201d But there\u2019s nothing I\u2019ve said that hasn\u2019t been, for example, in the New Scientist for the last twenty years. Nothing! So why am I called a prophet, and they are not? INTERVIEWER You write better. LESSING Well, I was going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9064],"tags":[9158,12071,12072],"class_list":["post-61579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote-unquote","tag-birthdays","tag-doris-lessing","tag-prophets"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nClairvoyance by Sadie Stein<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 22, 2013 \u2013 LESSING I know people say things like, \u201cI regard you as rather a prophet.\u201d But there\u2019s nothing I\u2019ve said that hasn\u2019t been, for example, in the New\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/10\/22\/clairvoyance\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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