Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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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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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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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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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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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT