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
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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETT