We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETTI suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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