Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETTBooks generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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