The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTTo read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
ALAN BENNETT