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

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
Posthumous
Sits
Worrying
Writers
Fame
Worry

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All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh.
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I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
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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.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
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The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes.
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This is a catastrophic universe, always and subject to hidden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
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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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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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