[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETT[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETTAt eighty things do not occur; they recur.
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETTI write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTI’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.
ALAN BENNETTThere is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
ALAN BENNETTAnd one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTThe appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT[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.
ALAN BENNETTArt comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETTIf you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETTIt’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 BENNETTNever read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETT