Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTCloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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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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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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.
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