Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETTI had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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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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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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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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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETT