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.
ALAN BENNETTIt’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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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.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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