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

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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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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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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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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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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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.
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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.
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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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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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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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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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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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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing