If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTI’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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






