What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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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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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 lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETT