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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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Critics
Expect
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More quotes by Doris Lessing
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
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
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
Doris Lessing
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing
When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
Doris Lessing
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
We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
Doris Lessing
The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
Doris Lessing
At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
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
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Doris Lessing
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
Doris Lessing
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Doris Lessing
Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
