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 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
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It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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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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They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury’s, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play.
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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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Clichés can be quite fun. That’s how they got to be clichés.
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f they’d been working with Alec Guinness, for instance, they wouldn’t have known they were born if they’d not towed the line!
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I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.
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Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
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Had your forefathers, Wigglesworth, been as stupid as you are, the human race would never have succeeded in procreating itself.
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One reads for pleasure…it is not a public duty.
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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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Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
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Why is it always the “intelligent” people who are socialists?
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The days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
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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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It’s the one species I wouldn’t mind seeing vanish from the face of the earth.
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In the way of circumstances and background to transcend I had everything an artist could possibly want. It was practically a blueprint.
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If I had to sum up my work, I suppose that’s it really: I’m taking the pith out of reality.
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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 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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Our father the novelist; my husband the poet. He belongs to the ages – just don’t catch him at breakfast.
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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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I suppose I’m the only person who remembers one of the most exciting of his ballets-it’s the fruit of an unlikely collaboration between Nijinsky on the one hand and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the other.
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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.
ALAN BENNETT