Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETTI tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETT