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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.

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
Talent
Point
Others
Didn
Sticking
Really
Stick
Sticks
Capacity
Perhaps

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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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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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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.
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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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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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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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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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