I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETTDefinition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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