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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.

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
Envy
Behinds
Behind
Moral
Always
Indignation
Hidden

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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
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Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do.
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I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.
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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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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.
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The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
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There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.
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[Some people think] that storytelling is telling jokes. So they have to be discouraged! Then others think that storytelling-is like an encounter group . . .
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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
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Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.
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One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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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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