It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTIf, 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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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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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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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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