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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 The Golden Notebook (1962)

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More quotes by Doris Lessing

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Martha Quest (1952)

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

The Four-Gated City (1969)

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006)

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Doris Lessing (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.