Doris Lessing Quotes
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Parents should leave books lying around marked 'forbidden' if they want their children to read.
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I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning.
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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.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
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When there's a war, people get married.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.
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Small things amuse small minds.
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Pearls mean tears.
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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
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The human race has been telling stories since it began.
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There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
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My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.