If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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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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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.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT






