Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETTSoft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
ALAN BENNETT