But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETTWhat she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT






