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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

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
Doubt
Jobs
Makes
Truth
Better
Writing
Fiction

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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.
Doris Lessing
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
Doris Lessing
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
Doris Lessing
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Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
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I am interested only in stretching myself, on living as fully as I can.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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No one's noticed. So much is destroyed, we can't be bothered.
Doris Lessing
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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
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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
Doris Lessing
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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
Doris Lessing