A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






