Quote

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Alan Bennett

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Alan Bennett
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: May 9
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Writer
Point
Closes
Fact
Perpetually
Facts
Factual
Inviting
Terse
Opens
Discursive
Subject
Untidy
Subjects
Briefing
Reading
Antithesis

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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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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...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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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.
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It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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But then books, as I'm sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action. Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already. You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated. A book, as it were, closes the book.
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I suppose I'm the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it's the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists?
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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