Writer Quotes by Doris Lessing

I'm just a story teller.

— Doris Lessing

I haven't got the energy to write now.

— Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.

— Doris Lessing

I never stopped reading.

— Doris Lessing

“A writer is the conscience of the world.”

— Doris Lessing

I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

Writers do not come out of houses without books.

— Doris Lessing

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

— Doris Lessing

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment.

— Doris Lessing

If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.

— Doris Lessing

A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— 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

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time…

— Doris Lessing

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

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

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us…

— 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

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

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

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

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

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

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one…

— 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 do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something.…

— 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

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

— 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

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to…

— Doris Lessing

The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It…

— Doris Lessing

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read…

— Doris Lessing

And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers,…

— Doris Lessing

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing

An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

— Doris Lessing

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

— Doris Lessing