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

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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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
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
Doris Lessing
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
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You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant.
Doris Lessing
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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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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
Doris Lessing
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
Doris Lessing