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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

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
Parents
Parent
Understand
Years
Really
Grown
Merely

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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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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.
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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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It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.
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America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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 wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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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Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
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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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The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
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I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate
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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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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
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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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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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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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