Keeping On Keeping On Quotes

“Today's ideology masquerades as pragmatism with that pragmatism reduced to the simplistic assumption that the basis of human nature is self-interest, a view which discount philanthropy, discredits altruism, with the only motive deserving of trust self-promotion and self-advancement.
This so-called pragmatism is wicked and it is doubly so because it is held up as being both realistic and a virtue. Whereas it is shallow, shabby and all too often callous.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“One does try not to be an Old Git but they don't make it easy.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Unlike today's ideologues, whom I would call single-minded if mind came into it at all, I have no fear of the state.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“...may the day never come when patients are referred to or thought of as customers. The word patient means a sufferer and when someone comes to the doctor they are coming not because they want to buy something but because they want help. Structure and restructure the Health Service how you will doctors are not shopkeepers, patients are not customers and medicine is not a product.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Like so many occasions in one’s life, including some of the most intimate moments, one would like to have been there without being actually present, a fly, as it were on one's wall, just watching.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“16 December. In his book The Poetics of Space (1958) the critic and philosopher Gaston Bachelard quotes the advice of a dictionary of botany: ‘Reader, study the periwinkle in detail, and you will see how detail increases an object’s stature.’ ‘To use a magnifying glass’, Bachelard comments a little later, ‘is to pay attention.’ (From The Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford.)”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Larkin says that they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And if you end up writing, then that’s fine because if they have, then you’ve got something to write about. But if they haven’t fucked you up, you don’t have anything to write about, so then they’ve fucked you up good and proper.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“... where the author has no ordained place or prescribed function and with nothing useful to do except gossip and make myself amiable; I succumb all too readily to the lure of conviviality and sociability’s powerful drug and just sit around and watch.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Cambridge... the place bowled me over. Leeds, where I had been born and brought up... but though I was not blind to its architectural splendours... I was famished for antiquity. I had never been in a place of such continuous and unfolding beauty as Cambridge and, December 1951 being exceptionally cold, the Cam was frozen and a thick hoarfrost covered every court and quadrangle giving the whole city an unreal and celestial beauty. And it was empty, as provincial places in those days were.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“... there are a few houses on the street left in their original trim, today’s newcomers seldom moving in until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“What Oxford gave me was time,,,I was supervised by someone whose passion for the subject, his care for his pupils and his moral rigour I have never forgotten and whose example has stayed with me all my life.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Audiences shouldn’t be homogenous before one even starts; it’s the performance, even of a reading, that should weld them into a unit.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“.,, but that apart he entirely talks about me- where do I live now, what am I reading, have I got a new play on but in that kind of half-attentive way politicians have, asking questions but scarcely listening to the answers- royalty, I imagine similarly.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“The equanimity with regard to my handwriting vanishes when I look at the corrections I make to a script...here my handwriting is big, childish, clumsy with no evidence of character and purpose... mine reverts to the all-over-the-place stuff I used to write while I was in the army and before I got to University... why I’ve no idea. But it is so.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“He asked whether I had any trouble with my stomach. I hadn’t, but the question was alarming...more widespread than I’d imagined...What in fact the doctor was asking was whether I had a delicate stomach.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch...the field would make a good Brideshead-like beginning for a film: as it is now and as it was then...’There is nothing I would want to alter or improve. Unattended to, disregarded (though it’s grade 1 listed) it is just as the past should be.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Libraries have to be local, they have to be handy. They shouldn’t need an expedition. But that early period in a child’s reading life is vital. Interfere with that, hinder a child’s access to books in whatever form and you damage that child probably for life. I have said it many times already but it’s worth saying again: closing libraries is child abuse. Enough ranting.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking of character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped to the foot.”
― Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On

“20 March - All the Leeds trains have been cancelled and I am wandering the station not knowing what to do when Rupert discovers me, having managed to get on to a Scottish train and change at Doncaster. Greatly elated by this we have a supper at La Grilla (halibut and chips) and then drive homeward in good spirits. Except that just after the Addingham bypass R. cries out and I see a grey shape in the headlights and he hits a badger - a young one, I would have thought and which, with its striped nose now lies senseless by the kerb. We drive back round the roundabout and then up the road again - and for one exultant moment it seems to have picked itself up and gone, but there it is, lying like an old rug by the roadside. We discuss running it over again to make sure it is dead - but neither of us can face it. R. is devastated; it's like Vronsky breaking his horse's back - a moment he can never call back - and feeling himself guilty and polluted by everything he hates - heedless cars, thoughtless motorists with him now one of their number. What particularly upsets him is that I have never seen a live badger - all the badgers I have seen like this one is now, a dirty corpse by the roadside. We drive on in sadness and silence.”
― Alan Bennett , Keeping On Keeping On