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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
Terms
Inside
Term
Talk
Slap
Labels
Critics
Expect

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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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.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
Doris Lessing
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
Doris Lessing