When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and… — 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
It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the… — 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 write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work. — 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 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
Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment. — 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
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. — 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
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by… — 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 have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
“Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written… — 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
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
