Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT