What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETTMemories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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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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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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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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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETT






