Alan Bennett

“A book is a device to ignite the imagination.”

“I write plays because it is the only way I can get a proper argument.”

“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.”

“I've never been able to understand why it is that just because I am a writer, I am supposed to have opinions on everything.”

“We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.”

“At eighty you're grown up.”

“Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.”

“Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it's now or never.”

“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. And now 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.”

“The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about a book.”

“My school days were the happiest days of my life; which should give you some indication of the misery I've endured over the past sixty years.”

“Art is the handmaid of human good.”

“If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.”

“You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.”

“One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.”

“Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.”

“History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.”

“All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use.”

“The days are gone, it seems, when respectable people had scary things in their private lives.”