Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETTAuthors, 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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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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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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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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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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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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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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[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.
ALAN BENNETT