Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTOne of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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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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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT