Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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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 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.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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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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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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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My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT