Alan Bennett

“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.”

“I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.”

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

“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.”

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.”

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

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

“Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise, teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement.”

“Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up.”

“[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.”

“I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.”

“Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.”

“I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over.”

“We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.”

“I have no nickname, as there has never been any need for one.”

“I didn't even have a clear idea of why I wanted to go to Oxford - apart from the fact I had fallen in love with the architecture. It certainly wasn't out of some great sense of academic or intellectual achievement. In many ways, my education only began after I'd left university.”

“I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.”

“We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.”

“Closing a public library is child abuse, really, because it hinders child development.”

“Too late. It was all too late. But she went on, determined as ever and always trying to catch up.”