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 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.'
funny writing thinking
Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
inspiration writing thinking
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
dream writing sleep
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
writing different firsts
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
mother war writing
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
writing unhappy
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
writing stories process
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
writing thinking down-and
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
sex writing difficulty
The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.
distance writing people
The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.
writing thinking optimism
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
giving-up creative-writers creative-writing
You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
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.