I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTThose who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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The longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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Here I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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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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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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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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I don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
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Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Life is generally something that happens elsewhere.
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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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.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
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So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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