Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETTNever read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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