The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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…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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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