I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETTSo, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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?”
ALAN BENNETT -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
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 -
Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETT -
Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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