The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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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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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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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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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
ALAN BENNETT