Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETTThe days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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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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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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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
ALAN BENNETT