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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.

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
Look
Profile
Looks
Publishers
Interviews
Writers
Started
Television
Quite
Profiles
Bigs
Shockingly

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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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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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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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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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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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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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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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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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