Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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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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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETT