His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
ALAN BENNETTClichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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