If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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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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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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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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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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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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