The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTImagine 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETT






