Artists, celebrated for their humanity, they turn out to be scarcely human at all.
ALAN BENNETTAnd now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
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I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
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Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
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No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
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One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
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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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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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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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But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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The Waste Land not figuring very largely in Mam’s scheme of things. “The thing is,” I said finally, “he won the Nobel Prize.” “Well,” she said, with that unerring grasp of inessentials which is the prerogative of mothers, “I’m not surprised. It was a beautiful overcoat.”
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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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I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETT






