Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTArt comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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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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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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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.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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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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