Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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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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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETT