Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETTI think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETT -
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETT -
Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETT -
Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT -
I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT -
Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
ALAN BENNETT -
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETT