Doris Lessing Quotes
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I am your original autodidact.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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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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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'm compulsive.
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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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Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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It's very interesting what you don't care about.
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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'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
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Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
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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.
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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 don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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 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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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
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If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.