If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTBecause you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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But 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.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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It’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.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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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.
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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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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETT