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.
ALAN BENNETTWe don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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And 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
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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…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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT