The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETT