Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETTA bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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[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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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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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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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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