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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
Story
Stories
Writing
Think
Pessimism
Thinking
Optimism
Telling
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More quotes by 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.
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
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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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Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.
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Our society is dependent on some precarious mechanisms, and they are very dicey. They can easily collapse.
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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'll be pleased when I'm dead. That will let me off worrying about all these wars.
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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.
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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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She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.
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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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Parents should leave books lying around marked forbidden if they want their children to read.
Doris Lessing
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Anna, there's something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.
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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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The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out.
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.
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We've got to believe in our beautiful impossible blueprints.
Doris Lessing
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
Doris Lessing
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
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What I did have, which others perhaps didn't, was a capacity for sticking at it, which really is the point, not the talent at all. You have to stick at it.
Doris Lessing