Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
ALAN BENNETTOnly when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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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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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETT