The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. — 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
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. — 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
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
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
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
When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend,… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something.… — Doris Lessing Copy Share Image
The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, 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
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an… — 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
