Doris Lessing Quotes
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There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
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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.
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I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it.
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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The two women were alone in the London flat. 'The point is,' said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, 'the point is, that as far as I can see, everything's cracking up.'
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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education.
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I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish.
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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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God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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The thing is, I haven't changed at all.
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I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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I've worked hard all my life. You have to if you want to get things done.
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I was taken around and shown things as a 'useful idiot' … that’s what my role was … I can’t understand why I was so gullible.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country. … I was really astounded that some people were shocked.
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Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
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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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I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.