Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
ALAN BENNETTChildren always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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.
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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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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT