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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
Term
Story
Stories
Writing
Think
Pessimism
Thinking
Optimism
Telling
Terms

More quotes by Doris Lessing

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I'm not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
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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.
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
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Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat.
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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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I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.
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I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'
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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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When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.
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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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A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.
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I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that other eye, which we can use to judge ourselves.
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
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Artists are the traditional interpreters of dreams and nightmares.
Doris Lessing
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What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows.
Doris Lessing
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
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It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic.
Doris Lessing