Quote

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

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
Writing
Worm
Way
Silk
Always
Worms
Producing
Animal
Stop
Written
Write

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
Doris Lessing
Image
What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
Image
Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
Doris Lessing
Image
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
Image
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
Image
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing
Image
If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
Image
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
Image
Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
Doris Lessing
Image
Literature is analysis after the event.
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
Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Doris Lessing
Image
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
Doris Lessing
Image
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
Image
For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
Image
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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
She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
Doris Lessing
Image
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
Image
I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Doris Lessing