If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETTI’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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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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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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My films are about embarrassment.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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So, 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.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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