Quote

I do not think writers or anybody would 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.

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
True
Theme
Must
Experiences
Writing
Writers
Going
Anybody
Something
Cause
Would
Ought
Think
Causes
Thinking
Write
Emerge

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
Image
The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
Image
All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
Image
Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
Doris Lessing
Image
Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
Image
I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
Image
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from 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
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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
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.
Doris Lessing
Image
I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
Doris Lessing
Image
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
Image
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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
The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing