Doris Lessing Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

We are all of us made by war, twisted and warped by war, but we seem to forget it.

Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. (Under My Skin, 1994)

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

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 vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one — but no one at all — can tell you what to read and when and how.

Doris Lessing quotes