The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
ALAN BENNETTRemember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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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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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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