[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETTI have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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 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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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT