We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTI dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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 always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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