Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
ALAN BENNETTTo begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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 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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT