Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
ALAN BENNETTThe 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.”
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
[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.
ALAN BENNETT -
We still don’t like to admit the war was even partly our fault because so many of our people died.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
ALAN BENNETT -
Life is like a box of sardines and we are all looking for the key.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m not “happy” but I’m not unhappy about it.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it’s in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one’s own.
ALAN BENNETT -
I was an only child. I lost both my parents. By the time I was twenty I was bald. I’m homosexual.
ALAN BENNETT -
Sometimes there is no next time, no time-outs, no second chances. Sometimes it’s now or never.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
The Breed never dies. Sapper, Buchan, Dornford Yates, practitioners in that school of Snobbery withViolence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature.
ALAN BENNETT -
I can walk. It’s just that I’m so rich I don’t need to.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
ALAN BENNETT