Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETTClichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTThe appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTBut then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETTWhy do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
ALAN BENNETTSome local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
ALAN BENNETTFar from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
ALAN BENNETTHad your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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 BENNETTA composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
ALAN BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETTI 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.
ALAN BENNETTTo play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
ALAN BENNETT