I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETTI was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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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[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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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETT






