If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETTChildren always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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