Doris Lessing Quotes
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Small things amuse small minds.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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My father was in the First World War.
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I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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Laughter is by definition healthy.
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For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
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I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
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None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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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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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.
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When there's a war, people get married.
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What they critics of Lessing's switch to science fiction didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.
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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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September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.