I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETTThe masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Books, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
ALAN BENNETT -
Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
ALAN BENNETT -
That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETT -
f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
ALAN BENNETT -
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
ALAN BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
ALAN BENNETT -
The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
ALAN BENNETT -
The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETT






