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.
ALAN BENNETTFar from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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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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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






