Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETTI bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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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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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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I saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
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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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I’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETT






