The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTThere’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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.
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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETT