Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETTf they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
ALAN BENNETT -
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT -
They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
ALAN BENNETT -
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT -
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
ALAN BENNETT -
Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETT -
The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
ALAN BENNETT -
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
ALAN BENNETT -
Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETT -
God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETT -
So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
ALAN BENNETT -
I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETT -
One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETT -
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
ALAN BENNETT -
Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETT -
My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT -
A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT