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.
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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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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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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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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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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…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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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETT