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I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

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
Unhappy
Writing

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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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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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I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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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.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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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.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
Doris Lessing