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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Nothing
Succeeds
Whole
Dreadful
Like
Publishing
Succeed
Success
Process
Wanted
Highlight
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Highlights

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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I do not think writers or anybody would 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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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
Doris Lessing
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
Doris Lessing
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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
Doris Lessing
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
Doris Lessing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
Doris Lessing
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing
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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
Doris Lessing
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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