My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTOur father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Illogically, 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.
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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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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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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETT