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.
ALAN BENNETTMy school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
ALAN BENNETT -
But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETT -
They 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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETT -
The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETT -
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETT -
Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
ALAN BENNETT -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT -
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETT -
If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
ALAN BENNETT -
Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
ALAN BENNETT