Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETTSome local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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My 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.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT






