Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTI write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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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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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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I 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.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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.
ALAN BENNETT