Alan Bennett - Thought Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

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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 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
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.

Alan Bennett
Franklin: Have you ever thought, Headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
Headmaster: Of course they're out of date. Standards always are out of date. That is what makes them standards.

Alan Bennett
At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling'.

Alan Bennett
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

Alan Bennett