It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETTBooks, bread and butter, mashed potato – one finishes what’s on one’s plate. That’s always been my philosophy.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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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Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
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Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
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I think perhaps that’s why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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Polly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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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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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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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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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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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
ALAN BENNETT