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" What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula. "

Doris Lessing

Imagination

Strong

Work

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" Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says. "

" 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. "

" There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. "

" 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. "

" We like to think we can solve everything, but we can't always. "

" 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. "

" Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse. "

" 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

Bear

Want

" I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women. "

" 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. "

" There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful. "

" I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing. "

" It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you. "

" Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors. "

" I am your original autodidact. "

Doris Lessing

I Am

Original

" The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms. "

" I'm just a story teller. "

" What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible. "

" I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.' "

Doris Lessing

Nothing

Process

" Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them. "

" My father was in the First World War. "

" 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. "

" It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important. "

" I am always being described as having views that I've never had in my life. "

Doris Lessing

Never

Always

" I haven't got the energy to write now. "

" Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew. "

" I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been. "

" I always hated Tony Blair, from the beginning. "

" All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed. "

" I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess. "