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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible.
Doris Lessing -
I'm compulsive.
Doris Lessing
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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
Doris Lessing -
All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.
Doris Lessing -
I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
Doris Lessing -
Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing -
Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing -
Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
Doris Lessing
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
Doris Lessing -
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing -
I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
Doris Lessing -
There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Doris Lessing -
They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off.
Doris Lessing -
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
Doris Lessing
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Sentimentality is intolerable because it is false feeling.
Doris Lessing -
I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing -
I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
Doris Lessing -
I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
Doris Lessing -
I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing -
It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
Doris Lessing
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing -
It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing -
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
Doris Lessing -
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed
Doris Lessing