Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETT






