Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
ALAN BENNETTYour whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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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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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






