It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT