What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETTWe were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
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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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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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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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?”
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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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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A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
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My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT






