But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETTYou go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
ALAN BENNETT






