But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTHis writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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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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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT