Doris Lessing Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

  Doris Lessing

  Children, Lying, Inspiration

  "Grande dame of letters who’s not going quietly". Interview with Amanda Craig, www.thetimes.co.uk. November 23, 2003.

• 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

  Jobs, Book, Thinking

  "Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102". Interview with Thomas Frick, The Paris Review, Issue 106, www.theparisreview.org. Spring 1988.

• And it does no harm to repeat, as often as you can, 'Without me the literary industry would not exist: the publishers, the agents, the sub-agents, the sub-sub-agents, the accountants, the libel lawyers, the departments of literature, the professors, the theses, the books of criticism, the reviewers, the book pages- all this vast and proliferating edifice is because of this small, patronized, put-down and underpaid person.'

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Criticism

• A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Doors, Bores You

  "The Golden Notebook". Book by Doris Lessing (1962), Introduction, 1971 edition.

• With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Thought Provoking

  Doris May Lessing (1992). “African laughter: four visits to Zimbabwe”

• 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-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Doors

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

• I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Succeed, Process

  "Doris Lessing Says She Used Pen Name to Show New Writers' Difficulties" by Edwin McDowell, archive.nytimes.com. September 23, 1984.

• 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

  Book, Reading, Week

• ...We try to have things both ways. We’ve always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn’t treat us by rule?

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Worry, Trying

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.32, HarperCollins UK

• It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Years, Months

• The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation.

  Doris Lessing

  Running, Book, Long

  "A Notorious Life". Interview with Dwight Garner, www.salon.com. November 11, 1997.

• What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Past, People

• Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Writing, Firsts

  Doris May Lessing (1981). “The Golden Notebook”, Bantam

• 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

  Book, Reading, Bores You

  "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing, (Introduction), 1971.

• Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, Kids

  Source: progressive.org

• Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Taken, Information

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

• When the print revolution occurred 400 years ago, human beings lost a certain mental capacity, including a sense of memory. In Africa today, you meet people who still carry everything in their heads, the way we used to. We rely on telephone books, address books. We have to look up everything.

  Doris Lessing

  Memories, Book, People

  Source: progressive.org

• When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Shapes, Patterns

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.21, HarperCollins UK

• I have kept diaries, of course, but they can't be read for quite a long time. I'm always curious about people who are fascinated by writers' lives. It seems to me that we're always in our books, quite nakedly. I wonder, too, does the private life really matter? Who cares what is known about you and what isn't? Even when you make public something that's been private, most people don't get it - not unless they're the same generation and have gone through more or less the same experiences. So, in a sense, we're all private, by definition.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Long, People

  Source: progressive.org

• My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Shapes, Way

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.13, HarperCollins UK

• Writers do not come out of houses without books.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Reading, House

  "A Hunger for Books" by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. December 08, 2007.

• Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

  Doris Lessing

  Book, Right Time, Bookshops

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.18, HarperCollins UK

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