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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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought 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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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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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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT