#now

God knows why nobody ever learns from the preceding generation - but they don't. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#generation #god #knows #learns #nobody

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. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#creative #creative writing #creative writing programs #deal #give

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#literature #now #people #respected #time

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now before I popped off. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#better #dead #give #had #i

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. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#equipped #everything #going #how #just

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. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#disappeared #in the past #learning #literature #much

You know, looking at it objectively, I've written one or two good books. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#good #i #know #looking #objectively

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. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#british #british empire #could #disappeared #empire

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#expectation #expected #free #generally #i

I understand a lot of the female needs. I'm not saying I know all of them all the time though. ↗

— Jared Leto

#i #know #lot #needs #saying