Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
ALAN BENNETTTo begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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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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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETT