Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTGod doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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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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[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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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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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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






