I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
ALAN BENNETTWhy do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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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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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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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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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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
ALAN BENNETT