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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
Great
Personal
Writing
Teach
Work
Creative
Programs
Much
Two
Telling
Life
Truth
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Give
Deal
Hard
Writer
Giving
Deals
More quotes by Doris Lessing
There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
Doris Lessing
What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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[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
...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
Doris Lessing
Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
Doris Lessing
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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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
Doris Lessing
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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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 white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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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
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.
Doris Lessing
With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing