Alan Bennett - Book Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

View all Alan Bennett Quotes
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Alan Bennett
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.

Alan Bennett
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.

Alan Bennett
The appeal of reading... 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.

Alan Bennett
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.

Alan Bennett
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
You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

Alan Bennett
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.

Alan Bennett