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.
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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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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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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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