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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.

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
Ordinary
Usually
Lives
Living
Sense
Incredulity
Feel
Flat
Feels
Flats
Always
Writers

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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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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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It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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