It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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