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I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

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
Terms
Term
Story
Stories
Writing
Think
Pessimism
Thinking
Optimism
Telling

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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Literature is analysis after the event.
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Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.
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Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly.
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For she was of that generation who, having found nothing in religion, had formed themselves through literature.
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Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.
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We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.
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One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy.
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As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
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Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.
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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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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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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
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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
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Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
Doris Lessing
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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A story is how we construct our experiences.
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