All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
ALAN BENNETT…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETT -
They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
ALAN BENNETT -
My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT -
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
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
ALAN BENNETT -
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT -
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
ALAN BENNETT -
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT -
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT -
Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
ALAN BENNETT -
The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETT -
I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETT