Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it 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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
ALAN BENNETT






