If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETTTo play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT