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| Doris Lessing (Photo Credit: Roger Mayne) |
Doris Lessing on writing, books, education, life:
You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. (The New York Times, April 1984)
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge (All Things Considered NPR, October 2007)
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever (Writers on Writing, 1986)
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society." (Golden Notebook, 1971 Edition)
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But 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. (A Small, Personal Voice, 1975)
The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -- for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative. That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities? I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us. (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 2007)
If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:
- Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014)
- User's Guide to Human Incarnation: Yoga of Primal Reality (2013)
- Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality In An Age of Global Peril (2012)
- Between Shadow and Night: The Singularity In Anticipation of Itself (2010)
https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/
See Also
Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com
Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)
