Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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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.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETT