If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
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
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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And one of the historian’s jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be… even on the Holocaust.
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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.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Above literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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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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Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Art 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.
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