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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
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Film Director
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Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
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More quotes by Alan Bennett

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I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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... 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.
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Art comes out of art it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.
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I've never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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.
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, 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.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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