Alan Bennett

Alan Bennett

"The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do."
14 Quotes
"The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do."
Alan Bennett The Uncommon Reader
"You don't put your life into your books, you find it there."
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
"A book is a device to ignite the imagination."
Alan Bennett The Uncommon Reader
"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
"How do I define history? It's just one fucking thing after another"
Alan Bennett The History Boys
"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
"We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules."
Alan Bennett Getting on
"Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about."
Alan Bennett
"Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement."
Alan Bennett
"All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use."
Alan Bennett
"I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university."
Alan Bennett
"I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment."
Alan Bennett
"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 go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper."
Alan Bennett
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