Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETTIt [Cambridge] wasn’t a holy grail in the sense that I’d never been to Cambridge.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
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Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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.
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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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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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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETT