A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETTThat’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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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.
ALAN BENNETT






