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.
ALAN BENNETTAnd 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
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
ALAN BENNETT -
I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
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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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETT






