I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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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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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT