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.
ALAN BENNETTOnce I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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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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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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 I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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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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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETT