I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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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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[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.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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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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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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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
ALAN BENNETT






