My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETTAll the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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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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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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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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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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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT