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.
ALAN BENNETTf they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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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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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 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
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The masters had no idea what was expected of you in the scholarship exam, so you just had to busk it really.
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Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
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My school was a state school in Leeds and the headmaster usually sent students to Leeds University but he didn’t normally send them to Oxford or Cambridge.
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But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten.
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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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To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
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Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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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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We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.
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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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That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
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