Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the go… - Doris Lessing

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

I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade.

(So why write novels? Indeed, why! I suppose we have to go on living as if ...)

She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don’t know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.