Doris Lessing Quotes
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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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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.
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I'm compulsive.
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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'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.
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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'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.
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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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Things are not quite so simple always as black and white.
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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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I thought that would go without saying, that if a mother gives up her children, it's very painful.
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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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Literature is analysis after the event.
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I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring.
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It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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I am your original autodidact.
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It's very interesting what you don't care about.
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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'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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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I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.