There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
ALAN BENNETTIf I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETT -
We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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 -
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT -
Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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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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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT