I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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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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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETT






