The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETTI bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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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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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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A 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.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETT