What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETTDeluded 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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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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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 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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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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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETT






