You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETTI can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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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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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETT