Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETTNever read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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