But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTBooks did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT