We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
ALAN BENNETTArtists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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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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You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
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I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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At eighty things do not occur; they recur.
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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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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.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point.
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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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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
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I dont know whether you’ve ever looked into a miner’s eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you’ve ever seen.
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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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