Alan Bennett citations

“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.”

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“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.”

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

“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)]”

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

“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“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.”

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

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

“… 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.”

“… 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.”

“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.”

“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.”