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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.

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
Really
Formulas
Imagination
Simple
Read
Strong
Fascinates
Need
Instantly
Needs
Reducing
Work
Formula

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My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
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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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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
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September 11 was terrible, but if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
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You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism.
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
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What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away.
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I never thought of London in terms of possible heroes - of course, there are thousands. It's a very talented city.
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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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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.
Doris Lessing