Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETTThey 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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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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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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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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[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.
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It [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
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One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
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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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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT