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All my friends' mothers were appalling women.

Doris Lessing

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Doris Lessing
Age: 94 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 22
Died: 2013
Died: November 17
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Bakhtaran
Doris May Tayler
Jane Somers
Mothers
Inspiring
Friends
Mother
Women
Appalling

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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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. This is what our function is.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
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The Freudians describe the conscious as a small lit area, all white, and the unconscious as a great dark marsh full of monsters. In their view, the monsters reach up, grab you by the ankles, and try to drag you down.
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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When I was starting out, science fiction was a little genre over there, which only a few people read. But now -- where are you going to put, for example, Salman Rushdie? Or any of the South American writers? Most people get by calling them magical realists.
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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.
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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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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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The Nobel Prize is run by a self-perpetuated committee. They vote for themselves and get the world's publishing industry to jump to their tune.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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