[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 BENNETTThe majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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My films are about embarrassment.
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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
ALAN BENNETT