Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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Authors, 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.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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 tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
ALAN BENNETT