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.
ALAN BENNETTWe have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT