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I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

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
Inspiration
Probably
Words
Disliked
Problem
Engineer
Writing
Engineers
Always
Engineering
Thinking
Scientific
Like
Scientist

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I never stopped reading.
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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 never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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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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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
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Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
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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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For there is never any way to go but in.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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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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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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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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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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