My films are about embarrassment.
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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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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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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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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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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