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" All my friends' mothers were appalling women. "
Doris Lessing
Friends
Women
All My Friends
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" I have ideas that I will probably never write now. "
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" What society doesn't realize is that in the past, ordinary people respected learning. They respected books, and they don't now, or not very much. That whole respect for serious literature and learning has disappeared. "
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" I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. "
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" With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how. "
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" Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. "
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" Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel. "
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" I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one. I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot. "
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" The human race has been telling stories since it began. "
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" It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months. "
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" If you are a young writer today, it's very hard. "
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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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" It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. "
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" There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to. "
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" When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires. "
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" 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. "
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Parents
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Child
" Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way. "
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Sometimes
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" Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew. "
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" When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. "
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" Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds. "
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" I see every book as a problem that you have to solve. That is what dictates the form you use. It's not that you say, 'I want to write a science fiction book.' You start from the other end, and what you have to say dictates the form of it. "
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Start
" You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. "
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" I do not think that marriage is one of my talents. I've been much happier unmarried than married. "
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Much
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" You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant. "
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You
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" Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. "
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" Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time. "
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" You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books. "
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" 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. "
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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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" I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. "
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Blair
Beginning
Always