[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETTYou have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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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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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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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.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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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.
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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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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT