“I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one’s movements are smoothed out, the hesitation diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?”
— Alan Bennett, 3 August 1981, Yorkshire. From ‘Diaries 1980-1995’ in ‘Writing Home‘.