We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTIf, 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.
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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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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It’s subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
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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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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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Authors, 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.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
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Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
ALAN BENNETT