Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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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.
ALAN BENNETT






