Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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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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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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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.
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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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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETT