Quote

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.

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
Thinking
Stories
Deal
Better
Deals
Unfold
Find
Rest
Cooks
Sometimes
Sleep
Useful
Great
Brain
Details
Writing
Story
Particularly
Even
Process
Works
Think
Dream
Dreams

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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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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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
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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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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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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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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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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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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
Doris Lessing