Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTLife is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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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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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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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.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT