Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
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The trouble is, as soon as you’ve chosen somebody it obscures anybody else you might have thought of.
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Books generally just confirm you in what you have, perhaps unwittingly, decided to do already.
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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.
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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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You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
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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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Over the years Miss Shepherd was visited by a succession of social workers so the character in the play is a composite figure.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
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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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If I am doing nothing, I like to be doing nothing to some purpose. That is what leisure means.
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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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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT -
A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT