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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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
Spendthrift
Courtiers
Attendant
Passion
Every
More quotes by Doris Lessing
What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing
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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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris Lessing
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
Doris Lessing
I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
Doris Lessing
Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
Doris Lessing
