Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETTBecause 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETT -
Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETT -
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT -
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT -
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETT -
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT -
One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
ALAN BENNETT -
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETT -
His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
ALAN BENNETT -
But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
A book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETT