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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.
Doris Lessing -
What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Doris Lessing -
You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much.
Doris Lessing -
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing -
My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies.
Doris Lessing -
I haven't got the energy to write now.
Doris Lessing -
There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.
Doris Lessing
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing -
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.
Doris Lessing -
What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
Doris Lessing -
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing -
It was OK, us being Reds during the war, because we were all on the same side. But then the Cold War started. Almost overnight we became enemies of people who were close friends - they crossed the street to avoid us.
Doris Lessing -
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. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.
Doris Lessing
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing -
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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 -
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
Doris Lessing -
My father was always so mingled with rage at his life.
Doris Lessing -
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing -
What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared.
Doris Lessing -
I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing -
You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?
Doris Lessing