The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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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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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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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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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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