The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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
-
-
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT -
But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT -
I 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 BENNETT -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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 -
Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETT -
The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
ALAN BENNETT -
Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
ALAN BENNETT -
A book, as it were, closes the book.
ALAN BENNETT -
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETT -
Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETT