Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.”
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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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’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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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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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETT