Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
ALAN BENNETTLife is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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 don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT






