I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
ALAN BENNETTIt [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT