The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
ALAN BENNETTWhy is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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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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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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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 was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETT