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I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

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
Something
Cause
Would
Ought
Think
Causes
Thinking
Write
Emerge
True
Theme
Must
Experiences
Writing
Writers
Going
Anybody

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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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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
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What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor.
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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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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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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.
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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.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
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