One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTI can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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