Alan Bennett, born in Yorkshire, England is an actor, an author and a famous playwriter. He was a history student at the Oxford University, where he was involved in stage work and collaborated with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. Later, he left studies and moved on to make his first stage play, Forty Years On.
His well recognized and famous works include The Madness Of George III, his series Talking Heads and the film History Boys. His main reason for fame was the readings of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-The-Pooh.
Lets read a few of his great quote:
On Life:
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
Life is rather like a tin of sardines, we’re all of us looking for the key.
On Courage:
He says some things which are taken as gospel, when they ought to be disputed. When he writes ‘Courage is no good It means not scaring others’, you want to say that just isn’t true. There is more to courage than that.
On Books:
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.
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.
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.
You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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.
The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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.
On Reading:
One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
[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.
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.
To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
She felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
