Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.
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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Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
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His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls.
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Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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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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Because you should realise the Cenotaph and the Last Post and all that stuff is concerned, there’s no better way of forgetting something than by commemorating 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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A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
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Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
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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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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
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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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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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Were we closer to the ground as children, or is the grass emptier now?
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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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At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like.
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My films are about embarrassment.
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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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Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale.
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Of course they’re out of date. Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.
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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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History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
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Remember. You are a physician. You are not a policeman nor are you a minister of religion.
ALAN BENNETT