I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETTAnd 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
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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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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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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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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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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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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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETT