"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."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Novelists from EnglandEssayists from EnglandPoets from EnglandPlaywrights from EnglandShort story writers from England
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Introduction (1971)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Doris_Lessing
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing (22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013) was a British writer, born Doris May Tayler. In October 2007, Lessing became the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in its 106-year history, and its oldest ever recipient.
81 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Doris Lessing →
Related Quotes
"If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air."
"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way."
"Laughter is by definition healthy."
"Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk…"
"You want me to begin a novel with The two women were alone in the London flat?"
"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 ha…"
"It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction."
"My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it w…"
"There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best."
"In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools."