The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTBut then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT