You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETTf they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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.”
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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