They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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My films are about embarrassment.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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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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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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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT






