Pass the parcel. That's sometimes all you can do. Take it, feel it, and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on, boys. That's the game I want you to learn. Pass it on.

— Alan Bennett

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.

— Alan Bennett

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something deferring 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.

— Alan Bennett

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.

— Alan Bennett

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

— Alan Bennett

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.

— Alan Bennett

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

— Alan Bennett

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

— Alan Bennett

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

— Alan Bennett

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

— Alan Bennett