I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
ALAN BENNETTI saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETT