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.
ALAN BENNETTBecause 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETT