I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETT