Quotes from Alan Bennett

One does try not to be an Old Git but they don't make it easy.

When dead she would exist only in the memories of people. She, who had never been subject to anyone would now be on the par with everybody else. Reading could not change that. Though writing might.

Reading was not doing… and as old as she was, she was still a doer.

She found that after she had written something down, she was happy. Happy as if she had been reading. And it came to her again that did not want to simply be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator where as when she was writing she was doing. And doing was her duty.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

She had always been good at duty until she started reading.

A few years ago she never would have noticed what Norman was doing. Or anyone else either. And if she took note of it now it was because she knew more of people's feelings than she used it. And could put herself in someone else's place.

Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilerating.

Pass the time?' said the Queen. 'Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

Asked where his inspiration came from, he said fiercely: 'It doesn't come, Your Majesty. You have to go out and fetch it.

Shut up this minute, you silly little creatures...

She said, 'He knows what I mean. Where did you get those shoes?' He said, 'They're training shoes.' She said, 'Training for what? Are you not fully qualified?' He said, 'If Jesus were alive today, Mrs Whittaker, I think you'd find these were the type of shoes he would be wearing.

I think of literature,' she wrote, 'as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but will never reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.

as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.

Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.

The Jews had holidays that turned up out of the blue and the Catholics had children in much the same way.

30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.

What people want to read often seems incongruous. A pair of biker-types taking away Thoughts of the Dalai Lama. People without access to instruments requesting sheet music. Aspiring poets sharing their work and then borrowing horror stories.

How old does one have to be still to say tits?

You don't put your life into your books. You find it there.

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.' Then (an unrelated thought): 'Etiquette may be bad but embarrassment is worse.

La gente, aveva concluso Dusty, può fare a meno di tante cose; il problema è che non riesce a non andare a comprarle.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met with in 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.

For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer.