Quote

Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don't try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it's someone announcing the departure of trains.

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
Mean
Rate
Trying
Bible
Something
Train
Liturgy
Never
Prayer
Announcing
Read
Trains
Means
Departure
Someone
Prayers
Best
Treated

More quotes by Alan Bennett

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Life is rather like a tin of sardines - we're all of us looking for the key.
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I'm all in favour of free expression provided it's kept rigidly under control.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
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The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.
Alan Bennett
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I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
Alan Bennett
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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. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
Alan Bennett
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
Alan Bennett
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
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That's a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories, knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
Alan Bennett
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.' To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: 'This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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.
Alan Bennett
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I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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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.
Alan Bennett
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Alan Bennett