Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETTIf I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
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