The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT