You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETTBooks generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETT