One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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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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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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