Quote

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

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
Always
Engineering
Thinking
Scientific
Like
Scientist
Inspiration
Probably
Words
Disliked
Problem
Engineer
Writing
Engineers

More quotes by Doris Lessing

Image
You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
Image
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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
The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
Doris Lessing
Image
Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
Image
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Doris Lessing
Image
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
Image
A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
Image
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
Image
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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 youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing
Image
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
Image
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Doris Lessing
Image
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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
Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing
Image
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing