At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETTIt [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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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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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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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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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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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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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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
ALAN BENNETT