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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.

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
Courage
Eighteen
Year
Scope
Girl
Aging
Young
Thirty
Self
Envy
Every
Independence
Largeness
Years
Genuine
Bitterly
Nine
Envied

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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
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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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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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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.
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None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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I never stopped reading.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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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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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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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 . . .
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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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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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