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.
ALAN BENNETTHave you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?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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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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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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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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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone.
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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.’
ALAN BENNETT -
Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETT -
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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But then, when I did go, the contrast between Leeds, which was very black and sooty in those days, and Cambridge, which seemed like something out of a fairystory, in the grip of a hard frost, was just wonderful.
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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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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT