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.
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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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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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[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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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