The 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ALAN BENNETTOf course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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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’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






