Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTDefinition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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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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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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.
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