The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
ALAN BENNETTThe days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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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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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
ALAN BENNETT