Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTClichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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 wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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.
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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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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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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT






