The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTWhy is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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