I always like to break out and address the audience. In ‘The History Boys’, for instance, without any ado, the boys will suddenly turn and talk to the audience and then go back into the action. I find it more adventurous doing it in prose than on the stage, but I like being able to make the reader suddenly sit up. Alan Bennett Read Quote
I can’t complain that I’ve had a public all through my writing life, but people don’t quite know what I’ve written. People don’t read you too closely. Perhaps, after I’ve died, they’ll look at my stuff, and read it through, and find there’s more in it. That may be wrong, but that’s what I comfort myself with. Alan Bennett Read Quote
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. Alan Bennett Read Quote
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. Alan Bennett Read Quote
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 Read Quote
