Alan Bennett: Read

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

“[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.”

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

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

“… 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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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