Doris Lessing Quotes

By 17, I was submitting to publications and collecting my first rejection slips.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

I have to be honest about this: I wouldn't tell a lot of kids to go and be writers. It's a tough, tough business. It's not a business. It's more like a tough road. It's a really tough road.

Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

I didn't go to graduate school, where all the important writers seemed to be getting their start. I didn't pursue getting published in literary magazines. I didn't even send out countless pitch letters and manuscripts to agents.

No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

I didn't say I have to be a writer, but I did say that I needed to publish at least one book.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

I'm not sure if you can strive your way into a career as a novelist. You have to write books; there are no short cuts.

When I started writing, I just hoped for a nice little paperback series.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

Wandering the book fair at AWP is a great way to get acquainted with a wide sampling of the diverse journals that are out there and the wide sampling of people who produce them.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.