The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETTHad your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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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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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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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.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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