It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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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The 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.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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