Books Quotes by Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.

— Doris Lessing

I never stopped reading.

— Doris Lessing

Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read.

— Doris Lessing

It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

— Doris Lessing

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

— Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

— Doris Lessing

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

— Doris Lessing

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

— Doris Lessing

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

— Doris Lessing

You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.

— Doris Lessing

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way…

— Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty…

— Doris Lessing

...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start…

— Doris Lessing

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

— Doris Lessing

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the…

— Doris Lessing

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think…

— Doris Lessing

“You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too…

— Doris Lessing

For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.

— Doris Lessing

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

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading…

— Doris Lessing

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

I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not…

— Doris Lessing

“Most novels, if they are successful at all, are original in the sense that they report the existence of an area of…

— Doris Lessing

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy.…

— Doris Lessing

I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop…

— Doris Lessing

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

“Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written…

— Doris Lessing

You know, whenever women make imaginary female kingdoms in literature, they are always very permissive, to use the jargon word, and easy…

— Doris Lessing

The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and…

— Doris Lessing

“Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral…

— Doris Lessing

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues…

— Doris Lessing

“Saul came into my room, prowling around and around, restless, and he saw the new notebook, and pounced on it. “Oh this…

— Doris Lessing

“Saw in the review of a book recently: “One of those unfortunate affairs—women, even the nicest of them, tend to fall in…

— Doris Lessing

“A few minutes later she was concentrating on her novel, which was half-finished. The theme of this book was a suicide. The…

— Doris Lessing

The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.

— Doris Lessing

Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

— Doris Lessing

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information…

— Doris Lessing

“Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty…

— Doris Lessing

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then…

— Doris Lessing

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

— Doris Lessing