Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETTOur perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT