It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETTI turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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 don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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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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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
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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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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






