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.
ALAN BENNETTWe still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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