“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.“
— Doris Lessing
“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
“What’s terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.”
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
In honour of Mum’s new kitten, here’s a passage from Doris Lessing’s On Cats that I always loved:
What a luxury a cat is, the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend.
– Doris Lessing, On Cats
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