Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Cloisters, ancient libraries ... I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
Alan Bennett
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Stones
Ancient
Cold
Cloisters
Learning
Libraries
Confusing
Stone
Smell
Library
More quotes by Alan Bennett
I've never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin. The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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
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.
Alan Bennett
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
Alan Bennett
To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
Alan Bennett
The thing I think about is that once you've done it, you then start to think about what you're going to do next. It's much easier to follow something that's not been as successful as this.
Alan Bennett
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Alan Bennett
Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.
Alan Bennett
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
Alan Bennett
I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
Alan Bennett
I'm not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
Alan Bennett
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
Alan Bennett
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
Alan Bennett
I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
Alan Bennett
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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.
Alan Bennett
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
Alan Bennett
I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky.
Alan Bennett
