Doris Lessing‘s Nobel Lecture is up at The Guardian:

Some much-publicised new writers haven’t written again, or haven’t written what they wanted to, meant to. And we, the old ones, want to whisper into those innocent ears: “Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold on to it, don’t let it go.”

This would also be a good time to go back to Orhan Pamuk, Seamus Heaney, and J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel lectures. Notice the four have in common: a reverence and love for books, and their underlying power, knowledge.

(Hat tip to The Elegant Variation.)