If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETTI 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?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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…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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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.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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