My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETTThere are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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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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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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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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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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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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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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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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