To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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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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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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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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 can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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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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