If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETTWhy do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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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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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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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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