Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETTHowever bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
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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.
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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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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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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






