• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Meg Waite Clayton

Author of the international bestsellers The Postmistress of Paris, The Last Train to London, and 6 other novels

  • Meg
    • Bio
    • Short Works
    • Meg’s Writing Process
    • Favorite Bookstores
  • Books
    • The Postmistress of Paris
    • The Last Train to London
    • Beautiful Exiles
    • The Race for Paris
    • The Wednesday Sisters
    • The Four Ms. Bradwells
    • The Language of Light
    • The Wednesday Daughters
    • International Editions
  • Events
  • News
  • Videos
  • Bookgroups
    • The Postmistress of Paris
    • The Last Train to London
    • The Race For Paris
    • The Wednesday Sisters
    • The Four Ms. Bradwells
    • The Language of Light
    • The Wednesday Daughters
    • My Bookclubs
  • Writing Tips
    • Tips for Writers
    • How Writers Get Started
    • On Agent Queries
    • Publishing Tips
  • Contact

November 17, 2013 By Meg Waite Clayton

11 Bits of Wisdom from Doris Lessing, On Reading, Writing, and Life

After I read in the New York Times that The Golden Notebook author Doris Lessing, who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, passed away this morning, I turned to rereading some of her writings and interviews. I hope you’ll enjoy these little wisdoms I’ve collected:the_golden_notebook

  1. “You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn’t care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing cant 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.” – from A Small, Personal Voice
  2. “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.” – from The Golden Notebook
  3. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.” – from Under My Skin
  4. “[T]he book, the story dictates how I’m going to have to do it. The story dictates the means of telling it…” – from a telephone interview with the Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org following the announcement of the 2007 Nobel Prize, October 11, 2007
  5. “I tend to speak my mind, which is not necessarily a good idea.” – from a Time Magazine interview
  6. “When I was bringing up a child I taught myself to write in very short concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I’d do unbelievable amounts of work. Now those habits tend to be ingrained … I think I write much better if I’m flowing. You start something off, and at first it’s a bit jagged, awkward, but then there’s a point where there’s a click and you suddenly become quite fluent. That’s when I think I’m writing well. I don’t write well when I’m sitting there sweating about every single phrase.” – from a Paris Review interview
  7. “It’s amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.” – from a Paris Review interview
  8. “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.” – from a Paris Review interview
  9. “Whether literature accomplishes anything or not, we do keep going.” – from a Southern Review interview
  10. “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.” – from the 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook

and my favorite, although I have not yet found the source of it:

“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
(If you have the source of that last one, please let me know!)
– Meg

Share:

Filed Under: Meg's Posts, Writing Quotes and Other Literary Fun, Writing Tips

Meg Waite Clayton


Meg Waite Clayton is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of eight novels, including the Good Morning America Buzz pick and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice THE POSTMISTRESS OF PARIS, the National Jewish Book Award finalist THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, the Langum-Prize honored THE RACE FOR PARIS, and THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. Her novels have been published in 23 languages. She has also written more than 100 pieces for major newspapers, magazines, and public radio, mentors in the OpEd Project, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the California bar. megwaiteclayton.com

Primary Sidebar

Categories

  • Book Marketing Tips (23)
  • Bookstores worth Browsing (33)
  • Guest Authors (66)
  • How a Book Gets Published (32)
  • Literary Travel (4)
  • Meg's Posts (376)
  • Poetry Tuesdays (15)
  • Publishing Tips (19)
  • Top Writing Tips (10)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • Writing Quotes and Other Literary Fun (115)
  • Writing Tips (62)

Archives

Footer

Post Archives

Follow Meg on Goodreads

Follow

  • Facebook
  • Instagram

Copyright © 2023 Meg Waite Clayton · Site design: Ilsa Brink