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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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
Things
Paid
Cost
Watches
Watch
Learned
Pain
Fear
Young
Anguish
More quotes by Doris Lessing
When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
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
None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it.
Doris Lessing
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
Doris Lessing
A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
Doris Lessing
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
Doris Lessing
All things come alike to all there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not.
Doris Lessing
I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
Doris Lessing
There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
Doris Lessing
Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
Doris Lessing
Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
Doris Lessing
