Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETTThat’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT