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.
ALAN BENNETTI 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
ALAN BENNETT