I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETTOur father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT