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.Collection: Reading
You always know when you're going to arrive. If you go by car, you don't. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.Collection: Cycling
One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.Collection: Pleasure
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale. Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, "And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?"Collection: Boys
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.Collection: Funny
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.Collection: Book
No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.Collection: Long
All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I'd got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.Collection: Effort
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I'm homosexual. In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.Collection: Children
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.Collection: Reading
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.Collection: Character
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.Collection: Reading
There's very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made. Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure. . . . A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth's.Collection: Character
I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.Collection: Expression
Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life. Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: War
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.Collection: Standards
Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?Collection: Intelligent
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.Collection: Running
I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.Collection: Needs
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.Collection: Play
I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.Collection: Hands
... 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.Collection: Philosophy
Polly: Education with socialists, it's like sex, all right as long as you don't have to pay for it.Collection: Sex
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!Collection: Depression
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Reading