Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTIllogically, 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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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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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT