And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT -
Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETT -
One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
ALAN BENNETT -
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!
ALAN BENNETT -
There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT -
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETT -
A 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.
ALAN BENNETT -
It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
ALAN BENNETT -
My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETT