Alan Bennett Quotes

All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.

Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not ...

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things fo...

How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scrip...

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on ...

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.

I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen i...

They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing....

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the sc...

Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; o...

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do tha...

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about l...

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at ...

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to ...

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit in...

I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying bu...

...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them withou...

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned an...

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and t...

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?” “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” “In church. Everybody else ...

You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly...

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of look...

It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not hav...

I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.