Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETTThe liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the 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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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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[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.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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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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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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