Doris Lessing Quotes

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

One quality of a good songwriter is to be vague. A vague notion, a vague image, but enough to give the listener the opportunity to make more out of what's being said than is there. That's the great thing about Bob Dylan's songs: We the listeners have made more out of them than he ever intended.

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.

There was a lot of fiction I did not enjoy, whose landscapes seemed bland and unevocative, the characters faint-hearted within them, the very words lacking vibrancy.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

The drawing and the crafting of the story are fun, but it's the overall meaning that matters to me. It might escape some people who just want to read a comic, and that's fine. The overall meaning is what matters.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.

I am not a political thinker. I'm not even much of a thinker. I'm a hack novelist.

I never accepted why there should be some invisible, wavy cutoff line separating Great Fiction from phosphorescent beauties and dollhouse miniatures, novels that contain a whole world in a snow globe.