Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETTKnowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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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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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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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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Once I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
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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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I turned down a knighthood. It would be like having to wear a suit every day of your life.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
ALAN BENNETT