One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTFar 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Books are not about passing 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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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT