Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETT
I 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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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT