Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; i… - Doris Lessing

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.

What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.

My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed