Quote

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

Doris Lessing

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Succeed
Success
Process
Wanted
Highlight
Book
Highlights
Nothing
Succeeds
Whole
Dreadful
Like
Publishing

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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
Image
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
Image
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
Image
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
Image
I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
Doris Lessing
Image
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
Image
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
Image
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
Image
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing
Image
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing
Image
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
Image
Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
Doris Lessing
Image
Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
Image
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
Image
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 hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
Image
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 all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing
Image
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
Image
It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
Doris Lessing