A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETTA composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT