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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. "

Doris Lessing

Big

Television

Look

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

" 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. "

" Pearls mean tears. "

" That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way. "

" My mother died happily of a stroke in her seventies. "

" 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. "

" Literature is analysis after the event. "

" You can't be a Red if you're married to a civil servant. "

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

" 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. "

" I am your original autodidact. "

Doris Lessing

I Am

Original

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

" I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame. "

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

" I think kids ought to travel. I think it's very good to carry kids around. It's good for them. Of course it's tough on the parents. "

" September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible. "

" I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars. "

" 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. "

" I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women's movement. "

" We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed. "

" It usually takes me a year to do a book. A year or eighteen months. "

Doris Lessing

Eighteen

Months

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

" Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. "

" I was a nursemaid. And it was pretty boring. "

Doris Lessing

Pretty

Boring

" 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. "

" My father was in the First World War. "

" Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance! "

" 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

" Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. "