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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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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
Encounter
Thinking
Encounters
Like
People
Jokes
Group
Telling
Groups
Others
Discouraged
Think

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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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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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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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.
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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
Doris Lessing
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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.
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
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Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
Doris Lessing
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
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The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.
Doris Lessing
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I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.
Doris Lessing
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All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
Doris Lessing
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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.
Doris Lessing
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
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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Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough.
Doris Lessing
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If we were to put into practice what we know ... but that is the point.
Doris Lessing
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Doris Lessing
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In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Doris Lessing
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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