I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
ALAN BENNETTA photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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.’
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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You must take people as they come. Remember, too that though you will generally know more about the condition than the patient, it is the patient who has the condition and this if nothing else bestows on him or her a kind of wisdom.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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I’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects.
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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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You don’t put your life into your books, you find it there.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
ALAN BENNETT