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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

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
Life
Truth
Program
Give
Deal
Hard
Writer
Giving
Deals
Great
Personal
Writing
Teach
Work
Creative
Programs
Much
Two
Telling

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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'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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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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.
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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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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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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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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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.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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.
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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.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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