If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETT






