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When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.
Doris Lessing -
It's very interesting what you don't care about.
Doris Lessing
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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 -
We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.
Doris Lessing -
All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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 -
I have ideas that I will probably never write now.
Doris Lessing -
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing -
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing -
I never stopped reading.
Doris Lessing -
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
Doris Lessing -
I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life.
Doris Lessing -
If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.
Doris Lessing
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing -
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
Doris Lessing