At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
ALAN BENNETTOf course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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.”
ALAN BENNETT