Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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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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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
ALAN BENNETT