[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETTYou 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.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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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 perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT