Write Quotes by Doris Lessing

11 Write quotes by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s thoughts on the writer’s craft are both practical and expansive, touching on purpose and perseverance. These eleven snippets give a succinct, earnest look at her philosophy.

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I haven't got the energy to write now.

Doris Lessing

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I have ideas that I will probably never write now.

Doris Lessing

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It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Doris Lessing

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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

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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

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I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.

Doris Lessing

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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

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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

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When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend,…

Doris Lessing

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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

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I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something.…

Doris Lessing

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More by Doris Lessing

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

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“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

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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

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There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

Doris Lessing

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“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

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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

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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

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“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

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I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.

Doris Lessing

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I haven't got the energy to write now.

Doris Lessing

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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

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“The charge that the United Nations are using bacteriological warfare in Korea cannot be dismissed merely because it would be insane.”

Doris Lessing

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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

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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

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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.

Doris Lessing

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