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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

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
Uncertain
Certainty
Condition
Accept
Conditions
Accepting
Certain
Insecure

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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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I never stopped reading.
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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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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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
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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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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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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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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 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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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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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.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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