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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

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A writer falls in love with an idea and gets carried away.
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I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
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Is there any delight as great as the child's discovering ability?
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Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.
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When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
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...or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see.
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For there is never any way to go but in.
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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.
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Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
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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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Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small.
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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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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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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Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.
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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.
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There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
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I am increasingly afflicted by vertigo where words mean nothing
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Literature is analysis after the event.
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
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