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Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask.
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
Self
Town
Mean
Anywhere
Towns
Behinds
Behind
Small
Living
Preserving
Means
Mask
More quotes by Doris Lessing
You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so.
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Borrowing is not much better than begging just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.
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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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
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
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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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.
Doris Lessing
Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
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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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But children can't be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can't be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn't be.
Doris Lessing
Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure.
Doris Lessing
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
Doris Lessing
If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing