If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETTI don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
ALAN BENNETT