You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETT[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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 can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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I 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.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETT