But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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
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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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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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