If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETTYou must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
ALAN BENNETT -
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
ALAN BENNETT -
Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
ALAN BENNETT -
An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
ALAN BENNETT -
You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
ALAN BENNETT -
You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETT -
What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
ALAN BENNETT