I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETTThe trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT