One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETTMy films are about embarrassment.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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 not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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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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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.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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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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