The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTI have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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.”
ALAN BENNETT