Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETTWhy do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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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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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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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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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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!
ALAN BENNETT