Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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It’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.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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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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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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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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