We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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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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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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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