Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETTKnowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETTThe liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETTIf, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
ALAN BENNETTIt was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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 BENNETTA photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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 BENNETTCloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETTCancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETTNor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETTHistory is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETT