Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETTIf, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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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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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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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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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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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT






