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"What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, 'Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,' reducing it to a simple formula."
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"Should it matter what genre it is if the book is good?"
"It's sarcasm, Josh.'Sarcasm?'It's from the Greek, sarkasmos. To bite the lips. It means that you aren't really saying what you mean, but people will get your point. I invented it, Bartholomew named it.'Well, if the village idiot named it, I'm sure it's a good thing.'There you go, you got it.'Got what?'Sarcasm.'No, I meant it.'Sure you did.'Is that sarcasm?'Irony, I think.'What's the difference?'I haven't the slightest idea.'So you're being ironic now, right?'No, I really don't know.'Maybe you should ask the idiot.'Now you've got it.'What?'Sarcasm."
"Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?"
"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
"I think a smart person today realizes that you have to be part of the art films that are done just for the sake of the art."
Explore more quotes by Doris Lessing
"A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself."
"Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty."
"I read this over today, for the first time since I wrote it. It's full of nostalgia, every word loaded with it, although at the time I wrote it I thought I was being 'objective.' Nostalgia for what? I don't know. Because I'd rather die than have to live through any of that again. And the 'Anna' of that time is like an enemy, or like an old friend one has known too well and doesn't want to see."
"The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind."
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."
"Pleasure resorts are like film stars and royalty... embarrassed by the figures they cut in the fantasies of people who have never met them."
"As I was saying, that's the dark secret of our time, no one mentions it, but every time one opens a door one is greeted by a shrill, desperate and inaudible scream."
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