Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETTLife is generally something that happens elsewhere.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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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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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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