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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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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
Thinking
Everyone
World
Understand
People
Truth
Persons
Person
Telling
Mean
Everybody
Kind
Talk
Really
Wish

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.
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The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid.
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What I had that others didn't was a capacity for sticking to it.
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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.
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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.
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Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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When I became political and Communist, it was because they were the only people I had ever met who fought the color bar in their lives.
Doris Lessing
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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
Doris Lessing
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I'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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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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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
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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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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
Doris Lessing