It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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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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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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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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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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