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If, For Instance, We'd Made The Film After The Show Had Been To Broadway, It Would Have Been Exactly The Same Film But We Would Have Been Assured That They Would Have Understood It. We Didn't Have To Do Any Alterations For Broadway. I Was Supposed To Go A Fortnight Before It Opened To Alter Anything That Was Necessary And There Was Nothing Really.

-Alan Bennett

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If, For Instance, We'd

Alan Bennett

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If, For Instance, We'd Made The Film After The Show Had Been To Broadway, It Would Have Been Exactly The Same Film But We Would Have Been Assured That They Would Have Understood It. We Didn't Have To Do Any Alterations For Broadway. I Was Supposed To Go A Fortnight Before It Opened To Alter Anything That Was Necessary And There Was Nothing Really.

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There Are More Microbes Per Person Than The Entire Population Of The World. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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.

I Have Never Understood Disliking For War. It Panders To Instincts Already Catered For Within The Scope Of Any Respectable Domestic Establishment.

I Can Walk. It's Just That I'm So Rich I Don't Need To.

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!

I Suppose I'm The Only Person Who Remembers One Of The Most Exciting Of His Ballets-it's The Fruit Of An Unlikely Collaboration Between Nijinsky On The One Hand And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle On The Other.

Children Always Assume The Sexual Lives Of Their Parents Come To A Grinding Halt At Their Conception.

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.

It [cambridge] Wasn't A Holy Grail In The Sense That I'd Never Been To Cambridge. But Then, When I Did Go, The Contrast Between Leeds, Which Was Very Black And Sooty In Those Days, And Cambridge, Which Seemed Like Something Out Of A Fairystory, In The Grip Of A Hard Frost, Was Just Wonderful.

Life Is Like A Box Of Sardines And We Are All Looking For The Key.

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. 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

An Article On Playwrights In The Daily Mail , Listed According To Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right And Centre. I Am Not Listed. I Should Probably Come Under Soft Centre.

If, For Instance, We'd Made The Film After The Show Had Been To Broadway, It Would Have Been Exactly The Same Film But We Would Have Been Assured That They Would Have Understood It. We Didn't Have To Do Any Alterations For Broadway. I Was Supposed To Go A Fortnight Before It Opened To Alter Anything That Was Necessary And There Was Nothing Really.

Polly: Education With Socialists, It's Like Sex, All Right As Long As You Don't Have To Pay For It.

[b]riefing Is Not Reading. In Fact It Is The Antithesis Of Reading. Briefing Is Terse, Factual And To The Point. Reading Is Untidy, Discursive And Perpetually Inviting. Briefing Closes Down A Subject, Reading Opens It Up.

Your Whole Life Is On The Other Side Of The Glass. And There Is Nobody Watching.

Philip Larkin Used To Cheer Himself Up By Looking In The Mirror And Saying The Line From Rebecca, 'i Am Mrs De Winter Now!

I'm Not "happy" But I'm Not Unhappy About It.

I Was An Only Child. I Lost Both My Parents. By The Time I Was Twenty I Was Bald. I'm Homosexual. In The Way Of Circumstances And Background To Transcend I Had Everything An Artist Could Possibly Want. It Was Practically A Blueprint.

[talking About The Holocaust] 'but To Put Something In Context Is A Step Towards Saying It Can Be Understood And That It Can Be Explained. And If It Can Be Explained That It Can Be Explained Away.' 'but This Is History. Distance Yourselves. Our Perspective On The Past Alters. Looking Back, Immediately In Front Of Us Is Dead Ground. We Don't See It, And Because We Don't See It This Means That There Is No Period So Remote As The Recent Past. And One Of The Historian's Jobs Is To Anticipate What Our Perspective Of That Period Will Be... Even On The Holocaust.

But Most Men Regard Their Life As A Poem That Women Threaten. 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.

Life Is Rather Like A Tin Of Sardines - We're All Of Us Looking For The Key.

The Breed Never Dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, Practitioners In That School Of Snobbery Withviolence That Runs Like A Thread Of Good-class Tweed Through Twentieth-century Literature.

We Have Fish And Chips, Which W. And I Fetch From The Shop In Settle Market-place. 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. Only When I Mention It To W. Does He Explain Kestrel Is Now A Lager. I Imagine The Future Is Going To Contain An Increasing Number Of Incidents Like This, Culminating With A Man In A White Coat Saying To One Kindly, "and Now Can You Tell Me The Name Of The Prime Minister?"

The Appeal Of Reading, She Thought, Lay In Its Indifference: There Was Something Undeferring About Literature. 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.

Our Father The Novelist; My Husband The Poet. He Belongs To The Ages - Just Don't Catch Him At Breakfast. Artists, Celebrated For Their Humanity, They Turn Out To Be Scarcely Human At All.

Clichés Can Be Quite Fun. That's How They Got To Be Clichés.

Reading Is Untidy, Discursive And Perpetually Inviting.

Schweitzer In The Congo Did Not Derive More Moral Credit Than Larkin Did For Living In Hull.

So Boring You Fall Asleep Halfway Through Her Name.

Cloisters, Ancient Libraries ... I Was Confusing Learning With The Smell Of Cold Stone.

If You Think Squash Is A Competitive Activity, Try Flower Arranging.

A Book Is A Device To Ignite The Imagination.

Why Is It Always The "intelligent" People Who Are Socialists?

Those Who Have Known The Famous Are Publicly Debriefed Of Their Memories, Knowing As Their Own Dusk Falls That They Will Only Be Remembered For Remembering Someone Else.

That's A Bit Like Asking A Man Crawling Across The Sahara Whether He Would Prefer Perrier Or Malvern Water.

To Play Trivial Pursuit With A Life Like Mine Could Be Said To Be A Form Of Homeopathy.

But Then Books, As I'm Sure You Know, Seldom Prompt A Course Of Action. Books Generally Just Confirm You In What You Have, Perhaps Unwittingly, Decided To Do Already. You Go To A Book To Have Your Convictions Corroborated. A Book, As It Were, Closes The Book.

The Majority Of People Perform Well In A Crisis And When The Spotlight Is On Them; It's On The Sunday Afternoons Of This Life, When Nobody Is Looking, That The Spirit Falters.

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Nature Played A Cruel Trick On Her By Giving Her A Waxed Mustache.

It Was The Kind Of Library He Had Only Read About In Books.

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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.

Here I Sit, Alone At 60, Bald And Fat And Full Of Sin Cold The Seat, And Loud The Cistern As I Read The (harpic) (lysol) Tin

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All The Effort Went Into Getting There And Then I Had Nothing Left. I Thought I'd Got Somewhere, Then I Found I Had To Go On.

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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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Remember. You Are A Physician. You Are Not A Policeman Nor Are You A Minister Of Religion. You Must Take People As They Come. Remember, Too That Though You Will Generally Know More About The Condition Than The Patient, It Is The Patient Who Has The Condition And This If Nothing Else Bestows On Him Or Her A Kind Of Wisdom. You Have The Knowledge But That Does Not Entitle You To Be Superior. Knowledge Makes You The Servant Not The Master.

You Don't Put Your Life Into Your Books, You Find It There.

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Of Course My Standards Are Out Of Date! That's Why They're Called Standards.

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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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