To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
ALAN BENNETTTo begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
ALAN BENNETTIt was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETTLife is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETTI think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
ALAN BENNETTPolly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTHere 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
ALAN BENNETTIt [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTI lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETTNature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTGod doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
ALAN BENNETTIf I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETTThe appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTTo read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
ALAN BENNETT