Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
ALAN BENNETT