Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETTOne of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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 thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
ALAN BENNETT






