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You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

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
First
Please
Important
Living
Writing
Write
Way
Else
Life
Part
Emerges
Care
Damn
Live
Shouldn
Firsts
Anybody

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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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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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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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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All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
Doris Lessing
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing