Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s line is a dare disguised as a maxim: stop treating the novel like a respectable citizen that should obey curfews, manners, and zoning ordinances. Coming from a writer who spent her career hopping borders - geographic, political, psychological, even generic - it reads less like airy encouragement and more like a strategic declaration of independence. “No laws” isn’t an invitation to sloppiness; it’s a refusal of gatekeeping dressed up as craft advice.

The phrasing matters. “There never have been” punctures the nostalgic fantasy that the “great” novel was ever a stable form with agreed-upon rules. Every supposed golden age is retrospectively legislated by critics who prefer their canon tidy. Lessing reminds you that what gets taught as structure often began as heresy: the interior monologue, the fragmented timeline, the untrustworthy narrator, the essayistic detour. The novel’s history is basically a record of exceptions that became templates only after the fact.

“Nor can there ever be” does the heavier work. It isn’t just historical; it’s philosophical. The novel, unlike a sonnet, is elastic enough to metabolize new technologies, new politics, new selves. Any attempt to codify it would freeze it at the moment power feels most comfortable - which is exactly when writers like Lessing feel most suspicious.

Context sharpens the edge. Lessing wrote through decolonization, feminism’s second wave, Cold War paranoia, and the rise of mass-market fiction. Her own books moved from social realism to dystopia to metafiction. The subtext: if your era is unstable, your form should be too. The novel survives by mutating, not by complying.