Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETTBooks generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT