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Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

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
Read
Thought
Time
Think
Interim
Thinking
Autobiography
Life
Report
Reports
Writer

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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
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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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You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.
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It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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You know, when I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires.
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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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There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.
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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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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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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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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.
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When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is the chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.
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Wisdom is better than weapons of war but one sinner destroyeth much good.
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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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Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.
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Writers do not come out of houses without books.
Doris Lessing