I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date.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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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Children always assume the sexual lives of their parents come to a grinding halt at their conception.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETT -
I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
ALAN BENNETT -
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
ALAN BENNETT -
Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
ALAN BENNETT