A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

When asked why Doris Lessing explained:


Doris Lessing Society
The Doris Lessing Society is dedicated to supporting the scholarly study of Lessing’s work. Alfred Tayler and his wife moved to Kermanshah Iran in order to take up a job as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia and it was there that Doris was born in 1919.

Doris May Lessing CH (née Tayler; born 22 October 1919) is a British novelist poet playwright librettist biographer and short story writer. Her novels include The Grass Is Singing (1950) the sequence of five novels collectively called Children of Violence (1952–69) The Golden Notebook (1962) The Good Terrorist (1985) and five novels collectively known as Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).