We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETTBut then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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