One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
ALAN BENNETTLife is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
ALAN BENNETT






