And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETTAbove literature?’ said the Queen. ‘Who is above literature? You might as well say one was above humanity.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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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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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.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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Schweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
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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.
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God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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, 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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We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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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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.
ALAN BENNETT