One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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 turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETT