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.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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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