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 BENNETTNever read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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 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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETT