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
ALAN BENNETTBut 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETT