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People Don't Mind Immoral Messages. They Don't Mind Art Which Says That Murder Is Good, Cruelty Is Good, Sex For Sex's Sake Is Good. They Like It, Provided The Message Is Wrapped Up A Little. And They Like Messages Saying That Murder Is Bad, Cruelty Is Bad, And Love Is Love Is Love Is Love. What They Can't Stand Is To Be Told It All Doesn't Matter, They Can't Stand Formlessness.

-Doris Lessing

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People Don't Mind Immoral

Doris Lessing

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People Don't Mind Immoral Messages. They Don't Mind Art Which Says That Murder Is Good, Cruelty Is Good, Sex For Sex's Sake Is Good. They Like It, Provided The Message Is Wrapped Up A Little. And They Like Messages Saying That Murder Is Bad, Cruelty Is Bad, And Love Is Love Is Love Is Love. What They Can't Stand Is To Be Told It All Doesn't Matter, They Can't Stand Formlessness.

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Thought Provoking

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Women Are Slaves To Their Beauty.

A Story Is How We Construct Our Experiences.

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As You Get Older, You Don't Get Wiser. You Get Irritable.

It Is Our Stories That Will Recreate Us, When We Are Torn, Hurt, Even Destroyed. It Is The Storyteller, The Dream-maker, The Myth-maker, That Is Our Phoenix, That Represents Us At Our Best, And At Our Most Creative.

Men Are Restless, Adventurous. Women Are Conservative - Despite What Current Ideology Says.

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You Remember With What You Are At The Time You Are Remembering.

If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

Think For Yourself

I Have To Conclude That Fiction Is Better At 'the Truth' Than A Factual Record.

It Was All Wrong, Ugly, Unhappy And Coloured With Cynicism, But Nothing Was Tragic, There Were No Moments That Could Change Anything Or Anybody. From Time To Time The Emotional Lightning Flashed And Showed A Landscape Of Private Misery, And Then — We Went On Dancing.

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If A Fish Is The Movement Of Water Embodied, Given Shape, Then Cat Is A Diagram And Pattern Of Subtle Air.

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I've Always Disliked Words Like Inspiration. Writing Is Probably Like A Scientist Thinking About Some Scientific Problem, Or An Engineer About An Engineering Problem.

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Small Things Amuse Small Minds.

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A Simple Grateful Thought Turned Heavenwards Is The Most Perfect Prayer.

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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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Black And White

I'm Very Unhappy When I'm Not Writing.

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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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 Do Not Think That Marriage Is One Of My Talents. I've Been Much Happier Unmarried Than Married.

I Wonder Why Do Wars Suddenly Start And Suddenly Stop, And Why Do We Brits And You Americans Get Involved In Some Of Them And Not In Others? Is It Possible That The Arms Manufacturers Quietly Foment Wars Without Us Knowing? Dropping Bombs Is A Very Profitable Business For Them. Gore Vidal Was Talking About This The Other Day, And He Made A Lot Of Sense. Whenever American Policy Seems Inscrutable, He Said, Remember The Military-industrial Complex. He's The One Who Should Have Been President.

Oh Cat, I'd Say, Or Pray: Be-ootiful Cat! Delicious Cat! Exquisite Cat! Satiny Cat! Cat Like A Soft Owl, Cat With Paws Like Moths, Jewelled Cat, Miraculous Cat! Cat, Cat, Cat, Cat.

Artists Are The Traditional Interpreters Of Dreams And Nightmares.

He Destroyed In Her The Knowing, Doubting, Sophisticated Ella, And Again And Again He Put Her Intelligence To Sleep, And With Her Willing Connivance, So That She Floated Darkly On Her Love For Him, On Her Naivety, Which Is Another Word For A Spontaneous Creative Faith. And When His Own Distrust Of Himself Destroyed This Woman-in-love, So That She Began Thinking, She Would Fight To Return To Naivety.

I Spend A Good Deal Of Time Wondering How We Will Seem To The People Who Come After Us. This Is Not An Idle Interest, But A Deliberate Attempt To Strengthen The Power Of That "other Eye," Which We Can Use To Judge Ourselves.

Often The Mass Emotions Are Those Which Seem The Noblest, Best And Most Beautiful. And Yet, Inside A Year, Five Years, A Decade, Five Decades, People Will Be Asking, "how Could You Have Believed That?" Because Events Will Have Taken Place That Will Have Banished The Said Mass Emotions To The Dustbin Of History.

I'm Going To Make The Obvious Point That Maybe The Word Neurotic Means The Condition Of Being Highly Conscious And Developed. The Essence Of Neurosis Is Conflict. But The Essence Of Living Now, Fully, Not Blocking Off To What Goes On, Is Conflict. In Fact I've Reached The Stage Where I Look At People And Say - He Or She, They Are Whole At All Because They've Chosen To Block Off At This Stage Or That. People Stay Sane By Blocking Off, By Limiting Themselves.

I Lived In A Brilliantly Lit Haze, Shifting And Flickering According To My Changing Desires. Of Course, That Is Only A Description Of Being Young.

We've Got To Believe In Our Beautiful Impossible Blueprints.

I Think Novelists Perform Many Useful Tasks For Their Fellow Citizens, But One Of The Most Valuable Is This: To Enable Us To See Ourselves As Others See Us.

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For Real Pleasure A Pleasure Resort Should Have No One In It But Its Legitimate Inhabitants, Oneself, And Perhaps One's Friends.

Everyone Knows That Where There Is Something That Is Capable Of Giving Profit, Then Exploited It Will Be.

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What They [critics Of Lessing's Switch To Science Fiction] Didn't Realize Was That In Science Fiction Is Some Of The Best Social Fiction Of Our Time.

At Last I Understood That The Way Over, Or Through This Dilemma, The Unease At Writing About 'petty Personal Problems' Was To Recognize That Nothing Is Personal, In The Sense That It Is Uniquely One's Own. Writing About Oneself, One Is Writing About Others, Since Your Problems, Pains, Pleasures, Emotions—and Your Extraordinary And Remarkable Ideas—can't Be Yours Alone. [...] Growing Up Is After All Only The Understanding That One's Unique And Incredible Experience Is What Everyone Shares.

Writers Brought Up In Africa Have Many Advantages - Being At The Center Of A Modern Battlefield; Part Of A Society In Rapid, Dramatic Change. But In A Long Run It Can Also Be A Handicap: To Wake Up Every Morning With One's Eyes On A Fresh Evidence Of Inhumanity; To Be Reminded Twenty Times A Day Of Injustice, And Always The Same Brand Of It, Can Be Limiting.

In University They Don't Tell You That The Greater Part Of The Law Is Learning To Tolerate Fools.

I Don't Think That The Feminist Movement Has Done Much For The Characters Of Women.

All Politicians Are Not The Same. I've Never Felt That Way. What Is The Same Is That Voters Get Very Excited About New Faces, Like Clinton And Blair - And They Have Unrealistic Expectations That The World Will Change Overnight. A Cynical Old Hand Like Myself Knows That It Won't.

That Is What Learning Is. You Suddenly Understand Something You've Understood All Your Life, But In A New Way.

Words. Words. I Play With Words, Hoping That Some Combination, Even A Chance Combination, Will Say What I Want.

What Of Course I Would Like To Be Writing Is The Story Of The Red And White Dwarves And Their Remembering Mirror, Their Space Rocket (powered By Anti-gravity), Their Attendant Entities Hadron, Gluon, Pion, Lepton, And Muon, And The Charmed Quarks And The Coloured Quarks. But We Can't All Be Physicists.

The Worst Superstition Is To Consider Our Own Tolerable.

There's Always This Sense Of Incredulity That Writers Feel, Because They're Usually Living Flat And Ordinary Lives, Because They Have To.

It Is The Mark Of Great People To Treat Trifles As Trifles And Important Matters As Important.

We Use Our Parents Like Recurring Dreams, To Be Entered Into When Needed.

The Older I Get The More Secrets I Have, Never To Be Revealed And This, I Know, Is A Common Condition Of People My Age. And Why All This Emphasis On Kissing And Telling? Kisses Are The Least Of It.

The Current Publishing Scene Is Extremely Good For The Big, Popular Books. They Sell Them Brilliantly, Market Them And All That. It Is Not Good For The Little Books. And Really Valuable Books Have Been Allowed To Go Out Of Print. In The Old Days, The Publishers Knew That These Difficult Books, The Books That Appeal Only To A Minority, Were Very Productive In The Long Run. Because They're Probably The Books That Will Be Read In The Next Generation.

My Father Was Always So Mingled With Rage At His Life.

At No Time, Anywhere, Was The Population Of A Country Told The Truth: Facts About Events Trickled Into General Consciousness Much Later, If Ever.

Intelligence Forbids Tears.

Writers, And Particularly Female Writers, Have To Fight For The Conditions They Need To Work.

On The News Two Dozen Events Of Fantastically Different Importance Are Announced In Exactly The Same Tone Of Voice. The Voice Doesn't Discriminate Between A Divorce, A Horse Race, A War In The Middle East.

Do You Know What People Really Want? Everyone, I Mean. Everybody In The World Is Thinking: I Wish There Was Just One Other Person I Could Really Talk To, Who Could Really Understand Me, Who'd Be Kind To Me. That's What People Really Want, If They're Telling The Truth.

For There Is Never Any Way To Go But In.

Time And Distance From The First And Second World Wars Doesn't Seem To Lessen Their Horrors.

Art Is The Mirror Of Our Betrayed Ideals.

I Hate To Sound Clichéd, But I Do See Life As A Journey. How Else Can You See It?

Argument Does Not Teach Children Or The Immature. Only Time And Experience Does That.

It Is Quite Easy To Remark The Absurdities And Contradictions Of A Country's Social System From Outside Its Borders, But Very Difficult If One Has Been Brought Up In It.

Music Attacks My Inner Ear Like An Antagonist, It's Not My World.

Sometimes I Dislike Women, I Dislike Us All, Because Of Our Capacity For Not-thinking When It Suits Us; We Choose Not To Think When We Are Reaching Our For Happiness.

I'm Not One Of Those Writers That Sits Worrying About Posthumous Fame.

My Mother Was A Woman Who Was Very Frustrated. She Had A Great Deal Of Ability, And All This Energy Went Into Me And My Brother.

People Who Love Literature Have At Least Part Of Their Minds Immune From Indoctrination. If You Read, You Can Learn To Think For Yourself.

I Woke Up One Morning, And I Couldn't Move My Arm. It Was The Oddest Thing, The Paralysis. I Called Up A Friend And Said, "i Think I've Had A Stroke," And, In Fact, That's What My Doctor Told Me. It Wasn't Terrible, But It Was Enough To Scare Me. Now I Think About Death All The Time. I Have My Death Arm, My Right Arm.

Some Books Are Not Read In The Right Way Because They Have Skipped A Stage Of Opinion, Assume A Crystallization Of Information In Society Which Has Not Yet Taken Place.

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