The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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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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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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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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 have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT