Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETTCloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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[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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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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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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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETT






