Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETTOne reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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