Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing
Doris May Lessing CHwas a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence, The Golden Notebook, The Good Terrorist, and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 October 1919
book worry trying
...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?
book writing criticism
And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'
book years months
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
book past people
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
book reading empty
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
book shapes patterns
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.
book taken information
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
book right-time bookshops
Don't read a book out of its right time for you.
book shapes way
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
running book long
The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.
book reading house
Writers do not come out of houses without books.
book writing firsts
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
book doors bores-you
Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
book succeed process
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'