Alan Bennett - Read Quotes

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

Alan Bennett
Here I sit, alone and sixty,
Bald, and fat, and full of sin,
Cold the seat and loud the cistern,
As I read the Harpic tin.

Alan Bennett
Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.

Alan Bennett
He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

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

Alan Bennett
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.

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