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.
ALAN BENNETTI’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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