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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

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
Novel
Law
Ever
Writing
Never
Crafts
Laws

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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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We do not know which of our silver products will be judged as gold by our successors, nor does it matter.
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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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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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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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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them.
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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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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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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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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
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