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 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
ALAN BENNETT -
We don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
ALAN BENNETT -
If you think squash is a competitive activity, try flower arranging.
ALAN BENNETT -
They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
ALAN BENNETT -
You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
ALAN BENNETT -
Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETT -
There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
ALAN BENNETT -
So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.
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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
ALAN BENNETT -
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
ALAN BENNETT -
Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
ALAN BENNETT -
I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
ALAN BENNETT -
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETT