Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETTMy films are about embarrassment.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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.
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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 books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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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.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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