Doris Lessing - Books Quotes

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There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Doris Lessing
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O. K., then I won't have to write it.

Doris Lessing
My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.
As I have said, this was not noticed

Doris Lessing
Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

Doris Lessing
The current publishing scene is extremely good for the big, popular books. They sell them brilliantly, market them and all that. It is not good for the little books. And really valuable books have been allowed to go out of print. In the old days, the publishers knew that these difficult books, the books that appeal only to a minority, were very productive in the long run. Because they're probably the books that will be read in the next generation. It's heart-breaking how often I have to say when I'm giving talks, "This book is out of print. This book is out of print." It's a roll call of dead books.

Doris Lessing
Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.

Doris Lessing
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

Doris Lessing
When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new.

Doris Lessing