It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETTAt 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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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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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT