Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETTAnd if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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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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 thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT






