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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

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
Hoping
Combination
Chance
Words
Play
Even

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
Doris Lessing
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
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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.
Doris Lessing
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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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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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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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
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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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
Doris Lessing
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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
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I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
Doris Lessing
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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
Doris Lessing
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing