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.”
ALAN BENNETTI’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
ALAN BENNETT