There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
ALAN BENNETTThere is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETTWere we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
ALAN BENNETTThe longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
ALAN BENNETTI 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.
ALAN BENNETTI wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETTAnd if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETTWe were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
ALAN BENNETTOur perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTBooks, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETTOne recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.
ALAN BENNETTI saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETTAuthors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
ALAN BENNETTI tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
ALAN BENNETTArt comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT