Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETTOf course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETTThe Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
ALAN BENNETTOnce I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETTThere are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
ALAN BENNETTI’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
ALAN BENNETTOur perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTCancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETTOver the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
ALAN BENNETTHowever bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
ALAN BENNETT[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETTWhy is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
ALAN BENNETTKafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETTThe masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT