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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.

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
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Terms
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More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Curse not the king, no not in thy thought and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
Doris Lessing
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
Doris Lessing
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Doris Lessing
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Doris Lessing
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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
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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.
Doris Lessing
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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
Doris Lessing
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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. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
Doris Lessing
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Doris Lessing
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing