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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

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
Think
Interim
Thinking
Autobiography
Life
Report
Reports
Writer
Read
Thought
Time

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Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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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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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.
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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 am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
Doris Lessing