The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
ALAN BENNETTHad your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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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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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETT






