Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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.
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I 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?
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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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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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETT






