One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETTNo mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
ALAN BENNETT






