We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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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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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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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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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT