Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers.
ALAN BENNETTBooks are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
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All the effort went into getting there and then I had nothing left. I thought I’d got somewhere, then I found I had to go on.
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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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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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I had no idea of who could play it, no notion really. Then Richard came to see us but I don’t think it was decided at that meeting.
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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’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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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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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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I 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.
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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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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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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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[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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The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.
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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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A book, as it were, closes the book.
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