I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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My films are about embarrassment.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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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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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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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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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.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT






