Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETTThat’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
ALAN BENNETT -
Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
ALAN BENNETT