Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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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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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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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.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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 was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT