You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“In the morning, when she wishes me to wake, she crouches on my chest, and pats my face with her paw. Or, if I… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy and generous… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“She was using the water as she had used the fruit earlier—to calm herself, to assure herself of the possibility of normality. Yet all… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“While she strode rapidly through the ward to the door at the other end, she was able to see that every bed or cot… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. — Doris Lessing Copy Share
What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
“The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.” — Doris Lessing Copy Share
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even… — Doris Lessing Copy Share
So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is. — Doris Lessing Copy Share
