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!
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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