I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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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.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
ALAN BENNETT