I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
ALAN BENNETTSchweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETT