But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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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.
ALAN BENNETT