[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
ALAN BENNETTPolly: Education with socialists, it’s like sex, all right as long as you don’t have to pay for it.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
God doesn’t do notes, either. Did Jesus Christ say, “Can I be excused the Crucifixion?” No!
ALAN BENNETT -
Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT -
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETT -
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
ALAN BENNETT -
Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETT -
What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT -
Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
ALAN BENNETT -
Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
ALAN BENNETT -
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 -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
Culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETT -
I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
ALAN BENNETT -
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
ALAN BENNETT -
You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETT