What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETTWhat she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
ALAN BENNETTStandards are always out of date. That’s what makes them standards.
ALAN BENNETTA composite too are the neighbours, Pauline and Rufus, though I have made Rufus a publisher in remembrance of my neighbour, the late Colin Haycraft, the proprietor of Duckworth’s.
ALAN BENNETTOnly when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this.
ALAN BENNETTI write plays about things that I can’t resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
ALAN BENNETTYou have the knowledge but that does not entitle you to be superior. Knowledge makes you the servant not the master.
ALAN BENNETTI don’t talk very well. With writing, you’ve time to get it right. Also I’ve found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn’t write no one would want me to talk anyway.
ALAN BENNETTWhy do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.
ALAN BENNETTLife is generally something that happens elsewhere.
ALAN BENNETTSchweitzer in the Congo did not derive more moral credit than Larkin did for living in Hull.
ALAN BENNETTSo, 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 BENNETTCulminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, “And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?”
ALAN BENNETTBut the headmaster happened to have been to Cambridge and decided to try and push some of us towards Oxford and Cambridge.
ALAN BENNETTThe appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature.
ALAN BENNETTSo boring you fall asleep halfway through her name.
ALAN BENNETTI saw someone peeing in Jermym Street the other day. I thought, is this the end of civilization as we know it? Or is it simply someone peeing in Jermyn Street?
ALAN BENNETT