One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
ALAN BENNETTThat’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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[talking about the Holocaust] ‘But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained.
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Only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
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Deluded liberal that I am, I persist in thinking that those with a streak of sexual unorthodoxy ought to be more tolerant of their fellows than those who lead an entirely godly, righteous and sober life.
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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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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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However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.
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…she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
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You have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
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I have never understood disliking for war. It panders to instincts already catered for within the scope of any respectable domestic establishment.
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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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And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.’ ‘But this is History. Distance yourselves.
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The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
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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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Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.
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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house.
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Nature played a cruel trick on her by giving her a waxed mustache.
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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
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I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.
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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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I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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But then books, as I’m sure you know, seldom prompt a course of action.
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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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