We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETTBut then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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Only 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.
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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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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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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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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