Alan Bennett

The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

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

...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylvia Plath - who were they? Only be reading could she find out.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

And it occurred to her that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before.

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

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