One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTAuthors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETT