Alan Bennett quotes - page 3

To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less... selfish. (Alan Bennett)
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
Alan Bennett
Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.
Alan Bennett
One of the good things about Larkin is that he still has you firmly by the hand as you cross the finishing-line, whereas reading Auden is like doing a parachute-drop: for a while the view is wonderful, but then you end up on your back in the middle of a ploughed field and in the wrong county.
Alan Bennett
Counsel: [You are charged with] loitering to commit a felony. Now then Mr Golightly...
Alan Bennett
The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.
Alan Bennett
Headmaster: Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince, with in his belt the short curved, gold sword of the Ashraf descendants of the Prophet, he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas, he was mistaken. "Who am I?" he would cry despairingly. "You are Lawrence of Arabia" passers-by would stop him and say, "And I claim my five pounds."
Alan Bennett
He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.
Alan Bennett
He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth.
Alan Bennett
I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.
Alan Bennett
Golightly: Call me Fingers. (Alan Bennett)
However, living in Tel Aviv, he was spared the fate of equivalent figures in English culture, an endless round of arts programmes where those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will be remembered only for remembering someone else.
Alan Bennett
George: I hate them all.
Alan Bennett
Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
Alan Bennett
A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot." [(, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)].
Alan Bennett
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.
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.
Alan Bennett
I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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)
Polly: Question is whether you hate the coach party because they're like the dogs or hate the dogs because they're like the coach party.
Alan Bennett
Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home.
Alan Bennett