[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETTOf course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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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.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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 tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT






