An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
ALAN BENNETTPut him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
ALAN BENNETT






