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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.

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
Quality
Five
Make
Hundred
Novel
Thousand
Philosophy

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
Doris Lessing
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
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I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
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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.
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.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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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 whole generation of women and it was as if their lives came to a stop when they had children. Most of them got pretty neurotic - because, I think, of the contrast between what they were taught at school they were capable of being and what actually happened to them.
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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What the feminists want of me is something they haven't examined because it comes from religion. They want me to bear witness.
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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Everyone knows that where there is something that is capable of giving profit, then exploited it will be.
Doris Lessing
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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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.
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