The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
ALAN BENNETTWhat I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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