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Doris Lessing


English
October 22, 1919
Writer
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I am your original autodidact.


Doris Lessing
Tags: Your Am I Am
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If you are a young writer today, it's very hard.


Doris Lessing
Tags: You Very Hard
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We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always.


Doris Lessing
Tags: Like Think Always
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.


Doris Lessing
Tags: You Married Red
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.


Doris Lessing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.


Doris Lessing
Tags: Dreams Like Our
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.


Doris Lessing
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You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books.


Doris Lessing
Tags: Good You Know
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.


Doris Lessing
Tags: You Then Talk
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There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.


Doris Lessing
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I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world.


Doris Lessing
Tags: About World Going
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I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married.


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
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
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
Tags: Peace You Think
My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
Doris Lessing
Tags: Great Me Who
What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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
Tags: Me Think Had
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
Doris Lessing
Tags: Society Up Our
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing
Tags: Great Change You
I remember World War II when there were very few books, very little paper available. For me to walk into a shop or look at a list and see anything that I want, or almost anything, is like a kind of miracle.
Doris Lessing
Tags: War Me Like
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Doris Lessing
Tags: You About Life
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
Doris Lessing
Tags: Like Think Know
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
Tags: War Like About