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.
ALAN BENNETTThe thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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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.
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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
ALAN BENNETT






