Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETTThey may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETT