It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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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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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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