Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETTI turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT