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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
Simple
Read
Strong
Fascinates
Need
Instantly
Needs
Reducing
Work
Formula
Really
Formulas
Imagination
More quotes by Doris Lessing
There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.
Doris Lessing
All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
Doris Lessing
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
Doris Lessing
I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.
Doris Lessing
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Doris Lessing
Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
Doris Lessing
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
Doris Lessing
We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing
There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
Doris Lessing
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
Doris Lessing
I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
Doris Lessing
A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing
Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
Doris Lessing
There is a whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
Doris Lessing
The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
Doris Lessing
The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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.
Doris Lessing