But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTOf course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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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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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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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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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.
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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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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETT