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 BENNETTMy 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETT -
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT -
Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
ALAN BENNETT -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT -
Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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 -
And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETT -
Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETT -
I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETT