Books are not about passing 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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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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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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETT