I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETTHad your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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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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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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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
ALAN BENNETT