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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
Law
Ever
Writing
Never
Crafts
Laws
Novel

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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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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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Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
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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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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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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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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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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.
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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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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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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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