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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

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
Novel
Emotion
History
Cannot
Flavour
Give
Matrix
Giving
Formal
Way
Novels
Time
Emotions

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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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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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.
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we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
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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 I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing.
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Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.
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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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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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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
Doris Lessing