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" All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed. "
Doris Lessing
Give
Spend
Being
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" I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been. "
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Never
Active
" I got married and I had children because of the Second World War, as all of us did, exclaiming, 'Oh, no, we are never going to bring a child into this wicked world,' but we had children by the dozen and got married. "
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War
" You cannot escape the fact that women mould your first five years, whether you like it or not. And I can't say I do like it very much. "
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Like
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Say
" 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. "
Doris Lessing
Big
Television
Look
" My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies. "
Doris Lessing
Her
Seventies
Mother
" I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing. "
Doris Lessing
Very
Unhappy
Writing
" I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess. "
Doris Lessing
Ways
Affect
Buildings
" I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement. "
Doris Lessing
Women
Gone
I Think
" Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way. "
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Quiet
Sometimes
Think
" Literature is analysis after the event. "
Doris Lessing
Analysis
After
Event
" Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing. "
Doris Lessing
Stealing
Interest
Better
" I was writing all my childhood. And I wrote two novels when I was 17, which were terrible. And I'm not sorry I threw them out. So, I wrote. I had to write. You know, the thing was, I had no education. "
Doris Lessing
Sorry
Writing
Education
" Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. "
Doris Lessing
Never
People
Royalty
" When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work. "
Doris Lessing
Child
Myself
Up
" I'm sure that everybody feels a kind of permanent anguish about what's going on in the world. "
Doris Lessing
Sure
Going
World
" There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to. "
Doris Lessing
Always
Feel
Sense
" It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.' "
Doris Lessing
Night
Think
Writing
" 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. "
Doris Lessing
Know
Start
Think
" For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying. "
Doris Lessing
Work
Only
Life
" My father was in the First World War. "
Doris Lessing
World
Father
First World
" If you are a young writer today, it's very hard. "
Doris Lessing
You
Young
Writer
" It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you. "
Doris Lessing
Find
You
Yourself
" I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life. "
Doris Lessing
Never
Always
Am
" It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. "
Doris Lessing
Some
Truth
Destroy
" 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
Over
Back
History
" I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.' "
Doris Lessing
Like
Nothing
Process
" I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. "
Doris Lessing
Much
Talents
Think
" The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war. "
Doris Lessing
Parents
War
Child
" 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
Hard Work
You
Work
" I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. "
Doris Lessing
Sitting
About
Well