f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
ALAN BENNETTI’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETT -
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT -
[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETT -
And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
ALAN BENNETT -
Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
ALAN BENNETT -
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
ALAN BENNETT -
Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT -
No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
ALAN BENNETT -
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETT -
If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETT