If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTI suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Some 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.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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A 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.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
ALAN BENNETT