Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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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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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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