A composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
ALAN BENNETTRemember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
ALAN BENNETT