Alan Bennett: Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the...

Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date? Of course they're out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.

Alan Bennett

statistics littles might

To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

Alan Bennett

pursuit easier selfish

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

Alan Bennett

cancer-survivor cancer illness

Why is it always the "intelligent" people who are socialists?

Alan Bennett

intelligence intelligent people

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.

Alan Bennett

elsewhere life-is life

Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.

Alan Bennett

race stupid funny

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.

Alan Bennett

conviction action book

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.

Alan Bennett

knowing memories fall

I can walk. It's just that I'm so rich I don't need to.

Alan Bennett

rich wealth needs

It's the one species I wouldn't mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth. I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

Alan Bennett

white wish mind

Of course my standards are out of date! That's why they're called standards.

Alan Bennett

standards courses

I'm for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.

Alan Bennett

freedom-of-speech given expression

I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.

Alan Bennett

instinct scope war

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.

Alan Bennett

play men two

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.

Alan Bennett

husband artist father

Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.

Alan Bennett

hull credit moral

I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.

Alan Bennett

eye time thinking

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.

Alan Bennett

class running school

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.

Alan Bennett

scripts film play

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.

Alan Bennett

godly dream thinking

Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!