It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETT






