I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETTTo read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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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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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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 am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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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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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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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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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETT