Standards are always out of date. That's what makes them standards.
Alan BennettRead
Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Readers often treat authors as figments of their imagination, revealing that the true value is in the author's act of writing.
This quote by Alan Bennett suggests that authors are not just creators of characters and stories; instead, they inhabit a realm of creativity whereby their existence and impact are deeply intertwined with their readers' perceptions. It highlights the notion that while readers engage with authors through their works, authors may not feel any personal obligation or connection towards the reader, but rather the act of creating literature is a gift bestowed upon them.
Themes
AuthorsImaginationReadingWritingLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
During a book club meeting, one could use this quote to emphasize the relationship between the author and the reader.
More from Alan Bennett
All quotes →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.
Alan BennettRead
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan BennettRead
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
Alan BennettRead
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
Alan BennettRead
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. And 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 BennettRead
Similar quotes
We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.
Franz KafkaRead
Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.
Robert Penn WarrenRead
I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.
Wislawa SzymborskaRead
Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
Mickey SpillaneRead
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
Will SelfRead
The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.
H. P. LovecraftRead