Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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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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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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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.
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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.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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