We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.
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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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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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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating it.
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
ALAN BENNETT






