Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETTHistory is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT