Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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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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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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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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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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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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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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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETT






