The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETTThe sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETTLife is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETTAt eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
ALAN BENNETTBooks did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETTCancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETTSoft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETTMy experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETTThere’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
ALAN BENNETTThe appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTWe don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
ALAN BENNETTTo begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETTA book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETT