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" I don't write well when I'm sitting there sweating about every single phrase. "
Doris Lessing
Sitting
About
Well
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" There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. "
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Sin
Only
Real
" I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been. "
Doris Lessing
Feminist
Never
Active
" 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
War
Child
" It's very interesting what you don't care about. "
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Care
Interesting
About
" Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors. "
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First
Distance
Seem
" Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel. "
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Love
Trust
Woman
" 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
" I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading. "
Doris Lessing
School
Myself
Go
" 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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Yourself
Life
Writing
" God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't. "
Doris Lessing
Generation
God
Knows
" Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance! "
Doris Lessing
Bad
Chance
God
" I do have a sense, and I've never not had it, of how easily things can vanish. "
Doris Lessing
Vanish
How
Things
" What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness. "
Doris Lessing
Me
Bear
Want
" This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything. "
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Work
Going
People
" I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women. "
Doris Lessing
Much
Done
Movement
" There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. "
Doris Lessing
Children
Time
Small
" I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame. "
Doris Lessing
Writers
Worrying
Those
" The human race has been telling stories since it began. "
Doris Lessing
Stories
Human
Human Race
" I'm just a story teller. "
Doris Lessing
Teller
Story
Just
" 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. "
Doris Lessing
Children
World
War
" You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant. "
Doris Lessing
You
Servant
Red
" The thing is, I haven't changed at all. "
Doris Lessing
Changed
Thing
" 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
" When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. "
Doris Lessing
Best
Young
Undo
" I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing. "
Doris Lessing
Very
Unhappy
Writing
" That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. "
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You
Learning
Life
" When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives. "
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Bar
Color
Communist
" I never stopped reading. "
Doris Lessing
Never
Reading
Stopped
" 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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Unexpected
Human
Blossom
" 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