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.
ALAN BENNETTLife is generally something that happens elsewhere.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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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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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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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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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT