Quote

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

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
Giving
Deals
Great
Personal
Writing
Teach
Work
Creative
Programs
Much
Two
Telling
Life
Truth
Program
Give
Deal
Hard
Writer

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
Image
Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
Doris Lessing
Image
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
Image
It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
Doris Lessing
Image
The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
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 to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
Doris Lessing
Image
It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
Doris Lessing
Image
Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
Doris Lessing
Image
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
Image
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
Image
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
Image
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
Image
I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris Lessing
Image
What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
Doris Lessing
Image
In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing