Alan Bennett Quotes

“[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.”

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

“It was the kind of library
he had only read about in books.”

“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.”

“One reads for pleasure… it is not a public duty.”

“Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.”

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”

“… 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.”

“To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less… selfish.”

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

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

“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)]”

“Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.”

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.”

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

“Cloisters, ancient libraries… I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.”

“I don't always understand poetry!'

'You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you will understand it… whenever.”

“Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.”

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”

“… Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up. Books, bread and butter, mashed potato - one finishes what's on one's plate. That's always been my philosophy.”

“Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.”

“Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. 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. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.”

“I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success, The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam's scheme of things.
"The thing is," I said finally, "he won the Nobel Prize."
"Well," she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, "I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat."”

“Schoolmaster: But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool.”

“Headmaster: Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Counsel: [You are charged with] loitering to commit a felony. Now then Mr Golightly…”

“The Channel is a slipper-bath of irony through which we pass these serious Continentals in order not to be infected by their gloom.”

“Then I want to end up 'Norwich. Well it's an epigrammatic way of saying 'Knickers off ready when I come home.”

“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."”

“Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.”

“Writer: What, above all, I'm primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality. If I had to sum up my work, that's it, really. I'm taking the pith out of reality.”

“He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.”

“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.”

“I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.”

“We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.…Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?"”

“Headmaster: I have never understood this liking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.”

“Franklin: Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.”

“I have no doubt that in heaven the angels will regard the blessed as a necessary evil.”

“Golightly: Call me Fingers.”

“Writer: I don’t know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes – for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.”

“An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail, listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.”

“Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don't catch him at breakfast. Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.”

“That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.”

“If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.”

“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.”

“Headmaster: They were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?”

“The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.”

“To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.”

“Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.”

“George: I hate them all.”