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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.

-Alan Bennett

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What She Was Finding

Alan Bennett

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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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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.

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I'm All In Favour Of Free Expression Provided It's Kept Rigidly Under Control.

I've Never Forgotten That Experience. But I Had Nobody At School That Was Either Like Hector Or Irwin. The Masters Had No Idea What Was Expected Of You In The Scholarship Exam, So You Just Had To Busk It Really.

We Were Put To Dickens As Children But It Never Quite Took. That Unremitting Humanity Soon Had Me Cheesed Off.

I Turned Down A Knighthood. It Would Be Like Having To Wear A Suit Every Day Of Your Life.

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.

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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.

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

So Boring You Fall Asleep Halfway Through Her Name.

A Book Is A Device To Ignite The Imagination.

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.

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.

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I Had No Idea Of Who Could Play It, No Notion Really. Then Richard Came To See Us But I Don't Think It Was Decided At That Meeting. The Trouble Is, As Soon As You've Chosen Somebody It Obscures Anybody Else You Might Have Thought Of. It's Like Going To A Place That You've Never Been To Before - You've Got A Picture Of It And Then You Go There And That Picture Is Totally Wiped Out By The Reality.

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We Started Off Trying To Set Up A Small Anarchist Community, But People Wouldn't Obey The Rules.

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.

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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.

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.

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My Experience Came Before Most Of You Were Born. 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. But The Headmaster Happened To Have Been To Cambridge And Decided To Try And Push Some Of Us Towards Oxford And Cambridge. So, Half A Dozen Of Us Tried - Not All Of Us In History - And We All Eventually Got In. So, To That Extent, It [the History Boys] Comes Out Of My Own Experience.

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

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The Days Weren't Long Enough For The Reading She Wanted To Do.

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

Standards Are Always Out Of Date. That's What Makes Them Standards.

I'm Not Good At Precise, Coherent Argument. But Plays Are Suited To Incoherent Argument, Put Into The Mouths Of Fallible People.

There's Very Little In The Substance Of [the Lady In The Van] Which Is Not Fact Though Some Adjustments Have Had To Be Made. Over The Years Miss Shepherd Was Visited By A Succession Of Social Workers So The Character In The Play Is A Composite Figure. . . . A Composite Too Are The Neighbours, Pauline And Rufus, Though I Have Made Rufus A Publisher In Remembrance Of My Neighbour, The Late Colin Haycraft, The Proprietor Of Duckworth's.

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

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