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.
ALAN BENNETT
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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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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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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![Alan Bennett Quote - [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.](https://minimalistquotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/talking-about-the-holocaust-but-to-put-something-i.jpg)
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETT