f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
ALAN BENNETTMy experience came before most of you were born.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT