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 BENNETTArtists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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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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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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You 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.
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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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