Alan Bennett > Quotes

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“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.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“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, The Uncommon Reader

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.”
― Alan Bennett, Getting on

“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."

[Baffled at a Bookcase (London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 15, 28 July 2011)]”
― Alan Bennett

“The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Above literature?' said the Queen. 'Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

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

“[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.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”
― Alan Bennett , The History Boys

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count. We still don't like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died. A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember. Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there's no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“I'm not "happy" but I'm not unhappy about it.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

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

“... 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.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.”
― Alan Bennett , The Uncommon Reader

“History is just one fucking thing after another.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“...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, The Uncommon Reader

“To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

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

“Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader