The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTThe masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
ALAN BENNETTI 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.
ALAN BENNETTBut most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
ALAN BENNETTReading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
ALAN BENNETTHere I sit, alone at 60, Bald and fat and full of sin Cold the seat, and loud the cistern As I read the (Harpic) (Lysol) tin
ALAN BENNETTThe thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
ALAN BENNETTOnce I start a book I finish it. That was the way one was brought up.
ALAN BENNETTA composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
ALAN BENNETTThe longer I practise medicine, the more convinced I am there are only two types of cases: those that involve taking the trousers off and those that don’t.
ALAN BENNETTCancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
ALAN BENNETTI write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTWhy is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
ALAN BENNETTI’ve never forgotten that experience. But I had nobody at school that was either like Hector or Irwin.
ALAN BENNETTLife is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT