The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTIt 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
ALAN BENNETT






