And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETTMy experience came before most of you were born.
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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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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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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.
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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT