I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETTOf course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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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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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT