Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETTNor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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You 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.
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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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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT