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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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
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Absurdity
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More quotes by Doris Lessing
What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
Doris Lessing
[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Doris Lessing
A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
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
A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
Doris Lessing
I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
Doris Lessing
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
A story is how we construct our experiences.
Doris Lessing
I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
Doris Lessing
No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
Doris Lessing
