Doris Lessing Quotes
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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 thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
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Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
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I'm compulsive.
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I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
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It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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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.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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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.
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I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
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Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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It's very interesting what you don't care about.
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There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
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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.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
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What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then - we went on dancing.
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I am your original autodidact.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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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.