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.
ALAN BENNETTSoft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
ALAN BENNETT






