Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETTAnd now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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