I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
ALAN BENNETTThere’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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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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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
ALAN BENNETT