Saturday, January 4, 2014

Doris Lessing: An Artist's Job.


"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. This is what our function is. We spend all our time thinking about how things work, why things happen, which means that we are more sensitive to what’s going on."

Doris Lessing, the Art of Fiction No. 102, excerpted here.