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.
ALAN BENNETTPolly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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