Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.
ALAN BENNETTWe don’t see it, and because we don’t see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
-
-
Books are not about passing time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds.
ALAN BENNETT -
I’m for the freedom of expression, given that it will be under strict control.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
So boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETT -
Have you ever thought, headmaster, that your standards might perhaps be a little out of date?
ALAN BENNETT -
Knowing as their own dusk falls that they will only be remembered for remembering someone else.
ALAN BENNETT -
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you.
ALAN BENNETT -
To begin with, it’s true, she read with trepidation and some unease.
ALAN BENNETT -
I write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETT -
…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.
ALAN BENNETT -
Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.
ALAN BENNETT -
No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.
ALAN BENNETT -
The thing I think about is that once you’ve done it, you then start to think about what you’re going to do next.
ALAN BENNETT -
Those who have known the famous are publicly debriefed of their memories.
ALAN BENNETT -
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
ALAN BENNETT -
A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.
ALAN BENNETT -
But the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETT -
Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, ‘I am Mrs de Winter now!
ALAN BENNETT -
If you find yourself born in Barnsley and then set your sights on being Virginia Woolf it is not going to be roses all the way.
ALAN BENNETT -
My films are about embarrassment.
ALAN BENNETT -
That’s a bit like asking a man crawling across the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Malvern water.
ALAN BENNETT -
Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
ALAN BENNETT -
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.
ALAN BENNETT -
You go to a book to have your convictions corroborated.
ALAN BENNETT -
You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.
ALAN BENNETT -
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less…selfish.
ALAN BENNETT