I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETTCloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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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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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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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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 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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETT