If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETTHere 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
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
ALAN BENNETT -
I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETT -
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT -
But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
ALAN BENNETT -
Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETT -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT -
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT -
I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
ALAN BENNETT -
You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
ALAN BENNETT