British author (1919-2013)
It was all nonsense to see things in terms of peaks and crises: the personal events, like the public ones, were long-term affairs, after all. They built up.... It is after--at least months, but it is usually years--that a person will say, My God, my whole life has changed, talking about a passion of love or hate, a marriage, a testing job of work. My life has changed because I have changed.
DORIS LESSING
The Summer Before the Dark
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
Doris Lessing: Conversations
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
DORIS LESSING
Time Bites