The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETTYou must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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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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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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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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






