Quotes by Alan Bennett

“One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.”

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

“Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.”

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

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

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to g...”

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

“[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 subje...”

“...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could...”

“I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.”

“Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.”

“Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to lea...”

“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 w...”

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

“How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another”

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

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

“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.”

“I have to seem like a human being all the time, but I seldom have to be one. I have people to do that for me.”

“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 so...”