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

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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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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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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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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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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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You remember with what you are at the time you are remembering.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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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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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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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.
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I never stopped reading.
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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.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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