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 BENNETTThe 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.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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My experience came before most of you were born.
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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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If, for instance, we’d made the film after the show had been to Broadway, it would have been exactly the same film but we would have been assured that they would have understood it.
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There is no such thing as a good script, onlya good film, and I’m conscious that my scripts often read better than they play.
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The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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There’s very little in the substance of [THE LADY IN THE VAN] which is not fact though some adjustments have had to be made.
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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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I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’
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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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It seems to me the mark of a civilized society that certain privileges should be taken for granted such as education, health care and the safety to walk the streets.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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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