Quotes from Alan Bennett

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

History is just one fucking thing after another.

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

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

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