I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETTIt’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETT