Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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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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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 appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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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.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






