Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETTThe thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT