I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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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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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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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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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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