Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETTChildren always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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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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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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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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.
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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 nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT