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The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

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
Stupid
Wells
Well
Cleverest
Believe
Trick
Believes
Tricks
Devil
Nobody

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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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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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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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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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What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.
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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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I hated the 1960's feminists, she says. They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life.
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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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It is not always possible to know, when you make a note of an event, or a state of mind, how this may strike someone perhaps ten thousand years later.
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
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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.
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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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I never stopped reading.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.
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It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it.
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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.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
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