Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
ALAN BENNETT