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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

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
Cutting
Ways
Names
Way
People
Nicknames
Potent
Size

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing
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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
Doris Lessing
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
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I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains
Doris Lessing
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
Doris Lessing
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Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.
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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I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
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.
Doris Lessing
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
Doris Lessing
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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 . . .
Doris Lessing
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Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Doris Lessing
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In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
Doris Lessing
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Basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked.
Doris Lessing
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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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So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing