Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETTPolly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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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 BENNETT