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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.

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
Great
Conscious
Line
Behinds
Behind
Lines
Past
Women
Stretching
Find
Seek

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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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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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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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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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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.
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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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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
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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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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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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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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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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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