My experience came before most of you were born.
ALAN BENNETTI bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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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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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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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