The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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