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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.

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
Woman
Admired
Shows
Noticed
Become
Expecting
Young
Notice
Women
Focus
Life
Middle
People
Attention
Anonymous
Show
Aged

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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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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.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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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.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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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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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
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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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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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