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.
ALAN BENNETTI lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
More Alan Bennett Quotes
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Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching.
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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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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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Life is rather like a tin of sardines – we’re all of us looking for the key.
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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.
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I lack what the English call character, by which they mean the power to refrain.
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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
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Standards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
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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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Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts.
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We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
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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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It’s like going to a place that you’ve never been to before – you’ve got a picture of it and then you go there and that picture is totally wiped out by the reality.
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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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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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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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I tried to explain to her the significance of the great poet, but without much success,
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An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left,
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Of course my standards are out of date! That’s why they’re called standards.
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It’s much easier to follow something that’s not been as successful as this.
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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’m not good at precise, coherent argument. But plays are suited to incoherent argument, put into the mouths of fallible people.
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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.
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There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world.
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I’ve never seen the point of the sea, except where it meets the land. The shore has a point. The sea has none.
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What I’m above all primarily concerned with is the substance of life, the pith of reality.
ALAN BENNETT