I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETTBooks generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETT -
Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETT -
The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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 -
The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETT -
My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT -
One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETT -
And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT -
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETT -
The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETT -
What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT -
But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
ALAN BENNETT






